I.

The first time Arthur comes out of the dream state he can feel the sweat dripping down his neck and behind the collar of his shirt. Since he went under the sun has shifted just the right amount, so that now he's in direct light and his leg is hot through his pants. He leaves the needle where it is in his wrist and looks over to Cobb who is sitting on the armchair that matches the couch where Arthur is spread out, one leg close to falling off the edge of the cushions.

Mal looks between them for a beat, and then hones in on her husband. "Well?"

"We're in business," says Cobb, which is when Arthur finally takes the needle out of his arm and shakes the feeling back into his fingers.

xxx

Arthur never remembers his father's gambling problem.

He remembers peanut butter and jelly week. He remembers their daring bus adventure, a can of generic coke resting between his knees. He remembers Halloween, a cardboard pirate sword and an eye patch made of construction paper. And he remembers his fifth birthday with startling clarity, the roar of the crowd and the pounding of hooves on the ground as countless pounds of horse flesh run run run. Sitting sideways on his father's knee and clutching at the small slip of paper, hands sweaty and the brim of his baseball cap shading his face from the blinding sun and making his forehead itch.

He doesn't remember the rest. That they lived off of wonder bread and off-brand peanut butter because his father lost a week's worth of pay on a college basketball game. That the bus adventure ended at the office where food stamps were handed out, the shame of it freezing his father's expression. That they never went again. He doesn't remember that his costume was pieced together from things laying around the house by his mother, whose mascara ran down her cheeks. That his father always, always put it all on the long shot.

His father was a terrible gambler.

Arthur isn't.

Gambling, he knows, isn't about luck. Or, at least, that's not all it is. And maybe his father has something to do with it, or maybe when he turned fifteen Arthur just got tired of walking everywhere, of being poor, but the point is: there's more to it than that. It's a numbers game. It's about understanding and tweaking the odds in your favor. Which is why Arthur is so good at what he does, why he can be perfectly sociable when he wants to be, why he does so many things right. He knows the system; one way or another, Arthur likes to keep the world rigged in his favor.

xxx

The next time he goes under, it's with both of them. Arthur follows along as Cobb runs him through it and Mal shifts little things and reshuffles the universe. Cobb is saying something about the maze, something about dreamers and pointing out things that couldn't really exist in the real world (and they're starting to notice, everyone on the street, but the three of them aren't really paying attention. Getting pulled down and drowned or smothered doesn't have much of a consequence yet except to wake up uncomfortable and off balance, like someone's shoved you mid-step). It's hard not to watch the world bend around them, and for someone who's usually so good at listening that should be a concern - but Cobb's said most of it before, he's too excited and is talking too much about things Arthur doesn't really need to know. Not when the dream is carefully shifting and shuddering, when they're walking loops and loops that couldn't logically exist.

It's a little thrill, and it takes him a while to recognize where exactly it's coming from. When he does finally figure it out, it fills his mouth with the taste of cheap racetrack beer and it makes his fingers itch. If he was the one creating the dream- he doesn't even want to think about what might happen, just suddenly wants to not be sleeping more than he has in his entire life.

Later, Cobb tells him about totems - which don't really make sense at all except in the barest terms, but Arthur pretends it does anyway. Because the loaded die is more than just something to remind himself of reality - it's something to rig the dreams with. It's a cheat. A gambit. It's a tether to keep from losing himself in more ways than one.

xxx

And truth be told Arthur doesn't have to cheat, because he's good. He's good in a way his father had never even considered. His father used to call him lucky. When he got older he started letting him pick horses and teams and numbers, ruffling his hair with his broad hand and telling everyone, kid's a whiz, he's my lucky charm. Almost never wrong, darndest thing you ever saw. Arthur was never lucky though, he was just smart. Quiet and observant and good with numbers. He knew how to play the game, knew how to break it down to its smallest components, manageable and neat. Arthur knew the odds before most kids knew their shoe size. He didn't have to cheat and he didn't have to be lucky, but the day his father handed him the die, his dry nicotine stained hands pressing it firmly into his palm, Arthur couldn't bring himself to hand it back.

That day he got on a greyhound bus and rode it half way across the country, to a big college with a well maintained lawn. To a better life built on impressive test scores and tireless focus, where people would call him ambitious but maybe too serious. Smart, but not terribly creative. Like an elementary school report card: Arthur is a very bright boy who needs to expand his horizons and try new things.

xxx

He can't say why it bothers him, but it does. And it shouldn't, because he knows the rules and this is what he's here to do, but it still rubs him a little wrong. The three of them are in an expensive hotel room with white upholstered furniture and soft white curtains. Mal had smiled when she'd opened the door, leading them inside. "Oh, very nice," in that rich accent as Arthur opened the kit and she and Cobb laid down on each side of the king size bed.

And now it's just him and them, except they're asleep and he's asleep but they're on different levels entirely and it makes him...uncomfortable. Five minutes on the clock first and it's the longest five minutes of his life (and somewhere, another layer entirely, it's the longest handful of seconds). In the dream, Arthur watches them sleep. He walks around the room, scratches the underside of his chin. He leans out the hotel window and looks down, down. Far below them, cars buzz along the street at night, their headlights pinpricks. It's a long way down.

The rules are the same here as anywhere else though. The timer runs out, Cobb and Mal wake up.

"What's it like?"

"Like this," Cobb says, a little distracted. He keeps catching Mal's eye and they keep grinning at each other.

"No," Mal says, shaking her head. "It's more abstract. It makes just a little less sense - and time passes slower there than here."

Which sounds unsettling - how far down can they go? -, but the look on Cobb's face is what makes Arthur okay with it. Because Cobb is staring at his wife like she's a bright star and he's smiling with just the corner of his mouth, like they're each other's best secret. Like Arthur can't see it everywhere in Cobb's dreams. In Mal's.

The second time they go under for ten minutes. It's all they have time for, and when they're done the hotel room lasts only as long as it takes Arthur to pack away the equipment before they all—

Arthur blinks back the sunlight, but doesn't rub his eyes.

xxx

Cobb is laughing, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the side of his hand.

"I'm serious," Arthur says, his brow is furrowed and the corners of his mouth are turned down.

"I know," Cobb says, one last short laugh, "You're always serious Arthur."

He can feel his expression slip into something even less pleasant, and he can't help it. He's a little too serious, after all. But it's important, and he's right, and Dom doesn't laugh often enough to warrant laughing now. To warrant laughing at him.

"It's fine. Look, we're getting results, you can't argue that. And neither can they. Which is exactly why they're going to keep paying us. We're getting results."

He doesn't say it's dangerous, because it's not. It's all a dream, after all. Arthur rolls the die across his palm, both hands in his pockets and shoulders tense, and he has nothing else to say.

Mal enters the room moments later, in a breezy skirt and bare feet. She's smiling wide and beautiful and asks if they're planning to stay inside the whole time. It's a beautiful day. Arthur feels himself relax, just the smallest amount, and Cobb is smiling again in an entirely different way. Mal is seven months pregnant but her stomach is as small as the day the two of them met. Outside the door a pier stretches into infinity over crystal blue waters, on the top of a mountain twice as tall as Everest. Her feet leave sand on the carpet and her skin smells like salt and tropical flowers.

xxx

Cobb goes down another level for the first time two days before his baby girl is born. Mal holds them steady on the edge, watching over both their bodies where they've left them, in the den of a brownstone house that is older and warmer than what she usually builds. It's only the third time Arthur's been two levels deep and there is this odd feeling of being perfectly at home in the world of it while still being utterly alien. The level itself is a sprawling garden with a high stone wall along the perimeter. He and Cobb secret themselves into a narrow box of hedges. Arthur checks his watch. They have plenty of time.

"You have five minutes and then we're back to Mal. Be careful," Arthur says as Cobb puts the needle in his wrist and lays down in the carpet-like grass. It smells sweet here. There are projections walking in the garden, smelling flowers, children playing in the fountain.

Cobb isn't really paying attention as he rolls his sleeve up well out of the way. "Relax, if something goes wrong we'll just have to stay here for a few extra minutes."

Which is true. If something happens and it doesn't work, or if Cobb can't quite handle every role he has to take by stepping into shared dream space alone, he'll just snap straight back here. Still, it makes Arthur uneasy, which makes him feel sick until he just starts to get serious and short and he says, "Be careful, Dom," like an order one last time before hitting the button. Cobb slides away.

Arthur stands and looks out over the garden, but he doesn't move farther than that - stays near Cobb and the case and watches the projections tilt through the maze of hedgerows and the straight planters of lilies and daffodils and roses. There are more children than Arthur is used to seeing in Cobb's subconscious - and he doesn't even begin to know how that works. If he's here and Cobb's below how is Cobb's mind is still operating on the level where Arthur can see it? He thinks that Mal would be able to explain it, she's better at this than he will ever be. The only reason he's even here right now is because everyone seemed to feel more comfortable keeping Mal closest to reality. Soon it won't be just the three of them.

The thought startles him more than Arthur likes to admit to himself and he looks back at Cobb stretched out on the grass in order to regain his balance. He puts his hand in his pocket and feels the weight of the loaded die. This isn't the first time he's known people who had kids, but this isn't like that. This is- Arthur can't really put a name to it, just that they spend more time walking through each other's heads. They spend more time tracking through dreamspace than the they do the house where Cobb and Mal live and work, that it's hard to think of them as just...people. People who are going to have a baby girl.

Cobb's shirt collar is flipped up awkwardly from how he laid himself out, and in two minutes between the heavy smell of the flowers and children laughing, it becomes unbearable to look at. Arthur bends down to straighten it and his knuckles brush skin. Cobb jerks awake like Arthur drop kicked him.

He snatches his hand away. "What happened?"

"I don't- am I early?" Turning on his side, Cobb clumsily looks at his watch and squints at the second hand. "It was going fine until-"

"I'm sorry. I barely touched you," Arthur tells him.

It's a day wasted.

xxx

Mal is on maternity leave a week and a half later. She's not technically on anyone's payroll but Arthur has her marked down as such, just like he marks down when they take vacation or sick days - although no one really takes those. Mal and Dom love their work too much, Arthur likes work too much, period.

It means that Arthur and Dom are working together, alone, for the first time since Arthur was hired, and it's strangely uncomfortable. Arthur feels like he's intruding, perhaps irrationally, and Cobb is still a little out of sorts: re-evaluating his life. They are both aware, almost painfully, of the fact that Mal is only a few rooms away, napping next to the new thing that is half her and half Dom. There's a tangible weight as they recline on the matching furniture, the empty settee another reminder.

They're both know that they are essentially working just to work. They can't really accomplish anything new with just the two of them. They've explored the possibility of a dream within a dream to very nearly its full extent, and frankly it isn't all that cutting edge anymore. Arthur has heard through the grapevine that a Russian private security firm is thinking about dipping their toes in. He doesn't think they will any time soon, there's no real need, and they don't really understand it. Still, it means that the second level is nearly passé.

But they're doing it anyway. Arthur's dream is something Dom designed awhile ago. He remembers distinctly the way that Cobb's fingers drifted over the curve of an arch, never quite touching the model as he taught it to him; the design based off of something old, classic, and European. It isn't his style at all, because he built it for Arthur. He'd kept most of Dom's original design, his only addition a snooker table. Some habits are hard to break. He plays sometimes when Dom and Mal are under, the solid clink of balls following their natural trajectory. He is never tempted to cheat or to manipulate the physics of it.

Today is different, though. He puts Dom under, carefully sets the timer, doesn't think about the fact that, technically, the machine isn't real. That it isn't actually doing what the machine in the real world does. He rolls the die in his palm. Five minutes. He passes around the table, studies the set up. Four minutes. He lines up shots, carefully, and misses. He walks back to Dom. Sits on the chair by his bedside and looks at his watch, unnecessarily. Three minutes, fifteen seconds. Dom's fingers clench the sheets, sudden, and his breath catches. This doesn't happen. Two minutes, fifty five seconds. Arthur's eyes are steady but his mouth is a serious line. There is a crease between his eyebrows. Dom's hands are still clenched, his forehead is beginning to sweat. Two minutes, thirty three seconds and Arthur can't bring himself to care that he is breaking protocol. His hand is on Dom's shoulder and he's standing up, shakes him once, hard, calls his name. Dom jerks awake with a gasp, sits up quickly and curls his shoulders in.

"What's wrong?"

Dom's breath is still unsteady and Arthur's hand is still on his shoulder, he can feel him shaking, "I fell. I broke my leg. Legs," he clears his throat, and sits up straight again.

Arthur's face is blank, and his tone is flat. He doesn't know how he feels. He takes his hand off of Dom's shoulder a moment too late.

"I couldn't snap myself out of it. We might need a buddy system."

Arthur is not thinking of how long the time difference between the first and second dream world is. He is not thinking about what would have happened if he had kept playing snooker. He is not thinking about the fact that it could have been him, or Mal, instead. He is thinking about changing protocols.

xxx

In the time it takes Mal to recuperate from the pregnancy, this is what he and Cobb have time to do:

First, they spend a few hours on just the top level, playing with reality to see how far they can push it before they have to run the maze, before either Arthur or Cob's subconscious has had enough of them and decides to run them down. It's happened before, given Dom and Mal's tendency to twist things when they want to - building hallways instead of using the door, raising bridges when they could just walk up a block and cross the one that's already there. It's not exactly comfortable, but the few times that Arthur shifts enough in the dream to warrant being dragged down (mostly by his projections, not Dom's - because he has a hard time thinking of ways to push the boundaries to the point that Dom's will come for him. He does it in the easiest way, takes things apart or omits them entirely. Creation, twisting what's there, is harder), the sensation fades quickly on waking and he just has to rub his chest a few times or touch the die in his pocket to reassure himself.

Though that's all something they've already known - that they can be rejected, shoved out by the subconscious itself. It's like being slapped awake, thrown out a door, but it's natural enough when looked at logically. It's finding the synthetic ways around it that are the puzzle.

"Well trauma won't do it," says Dom. He doesn't grimace though, because if he felt the pain from breaking his legs, he doesn't remember it since waking up.

They're standing on the sidewalk beside a busy street. There's a hotdog vendor. "The projections do more than that," Arthur remarks, flatter than he's really thinking and they share a sideways look.

Dom shrugs and steps off the sidewalk and into traffic. It's fast and Arthur make a sharp noise, goes to grab Dom's shoulder and drag him back instinctively, misses. He can just feel the texture of Dom's jacket before it slips out from under his fingers. And there's an awful crunching noise when the car hits and Dom goes flipping over the hood and bashes into the pavement. Breaks squeal and Arthur's still standing on the curb and it takes him a few seconds to realize that Dom's still there, laying in the street.

And for some reason he can't bring himself to run, just walks slowly to where Dom's bleeding all over. It's a dream, it's a dream. Dom doesn't say anything, just stares like he can't and twitches his fingers and Arthur looks around, spins in a circle. People are staring - fuck, not people. There's a roar in his ears and he's dreaming, he's dreaming. Arthur opens the trunk of the nearest car, finds a tire iron, and bashes Dom's head in with it. One, two, he raises it a third time and Dom is gone before he can bring it back down.

The world collapses around him as he's holding the iron loose in his left hand. Buildings explode and bricks fall into the street. There isn't any blood on the asphalt where Dom had fallen, only skid marks. As everything falls apart his own subconscious drags him under, and he wonders, briefly, what that says about him. He can feel indentations in his palm from where he'd gripped the metal too hard, right up until he wakes. When he does he just lays there, stares at the ceiling. Dom is up only a fraction of a second before him but seems fine. Stands up and scribbles some notes in a book resting on the desk. His left hand curls around the base of his neck as he thinks.

Arthur gets up, walks past him, past the room where Mal and the new baby are sleeping, into the guest bathroom, and throws up.

After that they start carrying guns in the dreams. They're the most efficient way, the quickest. It's difficult to get used to at first. Arthur forgets his. It's not like remembering your clothes or your totem or a deck of cards in your pocket. You have to create it, make it up out of thin air, remember something you don't know and make it part of yourself. The weight of it is alien. The pressure against his lower back uncomfortable. He wonders if it will always feel that way.

It won't.

xxx

The second thing they get to is this: they're walking along the Charles River Basin. Except not really, and the details aren't quite right - Dom didn't spend four years walking there like Arthur did. He doesn't actually know why Dom thought it would be a good idea to come here (unless it's some reminder for the both of them what Arthur's doing for them, some callback to the first time they took a walk here when Dom approached him for the job), but he does know that the discrepancies between Dom's memory of the campus and his own is making his head hurt a little. They walk up and down the water's edge without really saying anything - not anything important anyway. Dom starts to say something about the baby and Arthur stops in his tracks.

"Is there a point to this?" At first Arthur thinks he's asking about the layout of the dream, but once it's out of his mouth, he knows that's not all of it. He's never asked this question before because he thought it was obvious, but they've spent the past year and change exploring parameters and playing in dreams and, of course, there's a point to that mapping, but-

Dom stops and looks at him. "What's that supposed to mean?" He doesn't have his hands in his pockets. He looks straight at Arthur who looks straight back.

"Shouldn't we be running anti-intrusion tests? That's what we're here for, isn't it?" Not building houses and gardens and endless mazes. Not cheating physics for the sake of it. Cheating…everything. The gun is heavy against the small of his back and Arthur wants nothing more than to turn the loaded die over in his pocket, but he doesn't.

It's the first time he's felt like they might be about to get into an argument, the first time Arthur thinks he might be crossing a line instead of just reeling Dom back or making sure he doesn't do anything too… too- He doesn't like all the cheating.

Dom finally shrugs and scratches his temple with his thumb, the wedding band on his ring finger catching what little light is available from the overcast would-be Cambridge sky. "I've been talking to a company in California," Dom says, which is news to Arthur. "If we figure out a way to prevent idea extraction, they'll send us over some low level techs to run simulations on."

It should be a relief to know that he's not the only one thinking about these things, but instead there's just this sense of claustrophobia. Arthur says, "Oh, sure," and looks out over the surface of the water, the reflected university buildings not quite matching what he has in his head.

xxx

The only way to prevent extraction is to know how to do it better than anyone else. To know every trick, every play that could be made. Where secrets are kept and how best to get at them. They only have a few months to become pros at it, to impress their new bosses with their experience and their flair.

This means that they have to practice, a lot. Dom and Mal design the best mazes of their lives. They begin to sacrifice beautify for ingenuity, form for function. Their worlds begin to look more MC Escher than Frank Lloyd Wright as they bend their heads over sketches and models of things that would never work anywhere but in the dream. Paradoxes. Arthur teaches them to run cons, and they never ask where he learned. They learn to run, to be fast. To shoot back when they have to. They run simulations where Mal slips Arthur a piece of paper, a little secret scribbled down, and Dom looks for it. Or they run a random number generator and the mark learns it, remembers it and does their best to keep it hidden. It's not perfect, because they know they're dreaming. They know more than a real mark would. But it might be better - it's a damn sight harder.

The first time Arthur wakes up, turns to Mal, and asks, "Pigeons?", Dom seems surprised. Like he hadn't anticipated that he could be sneaky when he needed to be. Arthur wonders if he really seems that guileless.

Arthur's in his element, really. High research mode. Calculating odds and making contacts with undesirable people willing to sell secrets for money or favors. Gathering important studies and organizing their own haphazard research into something more professional, so that when they present their findings to the people in California they're treated with the respect they deserve. That they require.

For awhile Cobb finds the work exciting, a thrill in working with certain limitations, embraces the challenge. But near the end, when they are beginning to teach what they've learned, Arthur can see him getting tense and twitchy. The momentary rush of it fading, making him miss the unrestrained world of the pure dream. He watches him, careful. Phillipa is nearly two years old and Dom has responsibilities now.

xxx

Running strangers through the shared dream has its own set of challenges. It's not a perfect curriculum by any stretch of the imagination but it's worth it for the extra time spent cataloging and organizing and learning - every piece something the Cobbs can add to their papers, to the journal articles. Every new person they bring into it, everyone they teach the rules to, seems to come with their own unique set of issues associated with the learning curve. And Arthur's been doing it a long time, but the slow pick up of some of them irritates even him - never mind how Dom takes it. Mal manages better than the both of them, takes would-be security techs and company heirs through the dream. She designs mazes that look like sleek Dubai resorts, wilderness retreats, and talks them through the levels, somehow managing to keep everything balanced. They don't take anyone deeper than the first layer. For one, because it's not as stable, and for two because dropping down further doesn't really require an additional skill set. Not really.

After, when they've wrapped everything up and sent everyone home and gone over the data (with a ten minute pause while Arthur helps Mal make coffee and Dom goes to tuck Phillipa in for bed), Arthur says goodbye and takes off. It isn't until he's at the end of the driveway that he realizes that he's forgotten the files he wanted to take home. It's all numbers stuff, cleaning up the tallies and the logs so it makes sense to someone else. So he goes back, lets himself in, and slides down the hallway. Knows exactly where he left them: side table in the living room.

"Sorry, I forgot-" He stops in the doorway.

There's four minutes and twelve seconds left on the timer. Mal, barefoot, is reclining on the couch with her head on Dom's shoulder, her wrist up. The IVs run between their loose fingers. Dom's barely supporting his head with his hand, elbow jammed against the armrest. The whole house is quiet. There are empty mugs on the coffee table. A beep - the microwave marking the hour.

He stands there, all angles and corners, and then just turns and leaves without taking the files. Locks the front door and jogs to the car, drives six miles down the dark new York State highway and then pulls over on a patch of roadside gravel. He leaves the door open, the dome light in the car glaring through the windows. Arthur paces six steps away from the car, then six back and stops. It's a cool night and the small hairs at the back of his neck are prickling - overcast, no stars, just the smudged out glow of the moon overhead.

There's a buzzing low in the back of his head, the sound of white noise or hoof beats. Arthur thinks about kicking in the wheel well of his car and then changes his mind. Instead he takes the die out of his pocket and gets back in the car, holds it in his fist for the drive home and puts it on the bedside table before he lays down for what passes as sleep.

xxx

Mal is four months pregnant but he can hardly tell. Her behavior is more telling than her body, a hand coming up to rest on her stomach intermittently - a reminder or a reassurance. They aren't in the dream, and they haven't been since Mal found out she was pregnant. Ostensibly it's because they have other things they need to do. They need to organize their research. They need to find out what everyone else is working on and decide what they are working on next. They need to write research proposals and grant proposals. Really it's because Arthur doesn't think it's safe for her, not anymore. Not when he can feel the heavy weight of a gun at his back and a cocktail of chemicals flowing through him. He has morbid thoughts that the new baby, a boy, could be born with the same inability to dream that the three of them now share. In some way or another Dom must feel the same, because he's going on with it.

Mal and Arthur sit at separate desks and pass papers back and forth. There's a pile of paperclips on Mal's desk and a box on Arthur's. Dom is doing freelance architecture, scratching an itch as he hunches over a technical drawing, supplementing income. They do this every day. Mal sighs, stretches her legs out under the desk, curls her toes in before standing up. She's tired, they all are but she is especially. She stands up, walks over and lets her hand drift over Cobb's neck.

"I'm going to go lay down," she says. He turns his head so that she can kiss him and she does.

Arthur looks up at her, eyebrow quirked as she drifts over and sets a small stack of papers on the corner of his desk. "Don't work too hard," she says, brushes her lips against his forehead like it is the easiest thing. Arthur clears his throat, straightens the papers on his desk. She either doesn't notice his discomfort or is too used to it to care. When the door clicks shut behind her Dom makes a frustrated noise that draws him back to the present.

"I have to see this," Dom says, he's turned his chair around to look at him, right palm resting on the drawing. Arthur's eyebrows raise, the smallest amount, but he doesn't say anything. Just gets up, grabs the suitcase from where it rests high on a shelf crammed full of books and kitsch. Sets it on the table between the chair and the couch with practiced ease. He gets the feeling it's more an excuse than anything else but he doesn't fight it too hard, because if he did he gets the feeling that Dom would start sneaking away and doing it alone. The idea bothers him.

Dom is hovering behind him, close enough that Arthur can feel the edge of his jacket. "It's a library?" he asks, for something to say.

"Yeah," Dom says, reaches a hand over his shoulder and turns a dial, the cuff of his sleeve against the back of Arthur's hand, "it's a library."

xxx

They go from room to room, Dom looking for things Arthur has no understanding of. Still, he doesn't leave and go walking - sticks a few feet shy of Cobb's space, keeping him in his peripherals. They make their way from one cavernous room to the next. There are no bookcases, no tables with bankers lamps, and no ultra modern or overstuffed armchairs. Just sleek glass and steel and concrete, a strangely pleasant feeling of old and new. The whole dream is just room after room filled with a smattering of Arthur's projections and their indiscernible babble. Cobb leads him steadily up the floors until there is no circular staircase left and they come to a rest on the fourth floor landing. The whole level is just one broad swath extending to the exterior walls. No smaller rooms built in yet, only support beams and the same sleek floor that runs throughout. There's no one up here save the two of them and the sun coming in through the windows is too bright to make out the shapes of the buildings outside.

There's something unsettling about the emptiness of it, the fact that Arthur's mind just accepts the barren landscape for what it is instead of supplying it with a world outside the windows; furniture and whatever else is supposed exist on the upper floors of public buildings. Offices. Cubicles. Private research rooms and climate controlled store rooms for old manuscripts. Something. Instead, it's just him and Cobb pinwheeling slowly around the empty space. Arthur gets tired of it first - mostly because he doesn't know what he's supposed to be seeing -, and he moves back to the staircase so he can lean his elbows on the railing and look out into the empty space, sun from the skylights warm on the top of his head.

Cobb is moving across the gap, studying the curve of the windows. Arthur, attention fleeting, glances down between the lines of his fingers to the atrium floor. It takes him a second to realize what he's looking at and when he does he just stares until suddenly Dom is next to him, looking down too. Their shoulders are too close.

"It's not what I was thinking when they suggested a mosaic," he says, something in his voice expressing just how tacky Dom usually finds that kind of thing. "But I kind of like it." Arthur tears his eyes away from the brass inlay on the ground floor for a second. Blinks at the line of Dom's profile, his nose and mouth and the angle of his chin and throat. He looks back down.

There are streamlined horses reaching out across the bottom of the floor, galloping in a perfect circle - every beat and every footfall true to form despite the simplified gesture of the lines. "Why horses?" Arthur hears himself say.

Dom shrugs and turns his hands over in the empty air beyond the railing. "I didn't put it there."

xxx

They are late in the game, resting on their laurels, and Mal is so pregnant that Arthur is surprised she doesn't just pop. Unlike some women she doesn't put on weight all over; she just has a baby bump, like a television pregnancy. It makes her look disproportionate and makes him sympathetic. She is reclined on the couch with her feet up on the ottoman where Cobb is sitting, rubbing her ankles as he talks.

"Inception," he says suddenly, switches from small talk to business without any transition. Arthur is holding his tea cup to his mouth but his eyebrows are more than expressive enough for Cobb to read if he bothered to look up.

"It's the next logical step," he says, like a defense. Mal takes a bite from her grilled cheese. She's smiling that little smile she seems to have for everyone. Playful, but not mocking. Like she knows what he's going to say, but wants to hear it anyway.

"No one else has been able to do it," she says.

"No one else is as good as us."

Arthur clears his throat, not-quite-scoffing. Sets his cup back on the end table next to his sandwich. It is cut in half, diagonally, and it is getting cold.

"They aren't subtle. Did you see Van de Berg's research? He might as well have run through the dream screaming 'Ideas ideas ideas!'," Cobb says, looks up as he takes his hands off of Mal's ankles just long enough to wave them around. She tilts her head at him and the hands return to their proper places.

"Someone's going to figure it out though, and don't you think it would be better if it was us?"

Arthur knows that Dom is playing them, using Arthur's need to be on top of things and Mal's love of discovery, but he has to admit that Cobb has a point. It's the next logical step. They all know it, which is why half of their research proposals poke and prod at the edge of it. It's just that no one had been willing to say it until now. Because it's hard. Van de Berg may not be them, but he wasn't quite as tactless as Cobb pretends.

"It's going to take time," he says finally, picking up half of his cheese sandwich. He doesn't really like it. Grilled cheese makes him feel poor - young, but he eats it anyway.

"I know," Dom says, still looking down, thumbs rubbing circles over Mal's swollen ankle.

They're not talking about the months and months of testing, that's as obvious as 're talking about dream time. It's hard to keep people under for too long, Ten minutes, twenty, and then it got hard, people woke up; the dream got sketchy.

"We need a new formula," Mal says it so they don't have to.

"I'll look into it," Arthur says, by which he means 'it's done'.

xxx

Cobb and Mal work the legitimate avenues - they talk to university professors over the phone, get video tours of labs on the other side of the country. They've published some pretty legitimate research, and if the Cobbs are looking into inception then so should everyone else. But Dom doesn't want to travel, not with Mal so close to her due date and his two year old daughter climbing into his lap at every opportunity, coloring on the walls and putting her hand on the hot stove. Arthur picks Phillipa up under the arms and takes her out into the backyard when she tries to climb onto the back of the couch where Mal is attempting to do paperwork and participate in a video conference with some head of research in Delaware.

It's late summer and the leaves have all started to go yellow. He sets Phillipa on her feet in the grass. "Go play," and nudges her shoulder with his fingertips. She gives him this look that's straight off her dads' face, mouth in a downward curve and her eyes squinting, but brow not quite furrowed. Just concentrating on him, like if she stared at him long enough she could solve him like a puzzle.

Arthur looks back at her, chin on his chest and his elbows tight against his sides. "Well?" He nudges her again.

"Do you want to play with me?" Her voice is screechy and tiny as she's shifting around in the grass, not quite still, all rubber band joints and pale hair curling around in the breeze.

"I have work to do."

And maybe it's just what she's used to hearing lately, but Phillipa takes it and goes trudging barefoot over the grass, kicking a soccer ball with all the grace of a washed up jellyfish. Arthur looks back through the open door. He can hear the hum of Cobb's voice: "No, no. It has to be something we can administer to ourselves independently of the somnacin-"

His phone buzzes in his pocket. Arthur goes digging for it, sits down on the porch step as he answers. Cobb and Mal work the legitimate avenues; the other side is left to him. The less than reputable man on the other end of the line says, with far too much smarm, that he's been digging around. That he knows a guy who knows a guy who might know someone. Arthur fishes a pen and a receipt out of his jacket pocket. He writes the number down.

"Now, I think this warrants a favor-" all smooth accent and charm that makes Arthur grit his teeth despite the three thousand mile plus distance from one end of the line to the other.

"Goodbye." He hangs up.

And Phillipa is back with the soccer ball. She kicks it to him and Arthur catches it under his shoe as he dials the number. Puts the phone to his ear and picks up the ball. He chucks it out into the lawn. Phillipa runs after it. The line buzzes. No one answers. Phillipa brings the ball back and he tosses it again. There's no answering machine, but he wouldn't leave a message anyway.

"What're you doing?" Mal asks, standing in the doorway. She has one hand under her swollen belly and the other pressed against the doorframe. She's tired and Arthur can tell she's a little put out with how long it's taking them to get this done. But at the same time her face is soft in the right places when she glances between Arthur low on the step and out across the yard where her daughter is fumbling to scrape the soccer ball out from under the porch of the playhouse that Dom built for her second birthday.

"Playing fetch," Arthur monotones, sliding his phone back into his pocket.

She laughs suddenly, full and ringing, head tipped back, and it makes his stomach tighten pleasantly. He's not exactly sure why, just knows that he rarely feels anything outside of foolishness when someone laughs at him; this isn't one of those times.

xxx

Mal has a son. He is beautiful and blond. Blonder than Phillipa if that's even possible. Otherwise he's more like his mother, softer somehow, with wide eyes and dark lashes. He's more agreeable too, Mal calls him 'easier', and says something about not getting that from Dom. She's more relaxed.

They all are. Everything is easier. Arthur's shady tip followed through; brought them to something that ended up being a lot more legal. Traced back the source and pulled strings and soon, soon they're going to be able to really get into it. Dom thinks they'll need a nanny when they start. Mal says that's silly, that she can have her mother come stay with them while they're working. There isn't an argument because nothing about them is typical. Less than a month and they'll be working on something new and groundbreaking, possibly impossible. There's an undeniable undercurrent of excitement.

Until then Dom and Arthur spend time learning the new formula, figuring out it's quirks, running tests. It works really well. The dream world is just overall more stable; even one layer down it's noticeable. There is a minor sedative involved that makes it easier to be unaffected by reality. Where things like the rumbling of a truck used to be enough to throw them off before, now they don't have to worry about even the sudden ringing of a doorbell (which on one memorable occasion had been disabled). For the most part it's ideal.

For the most part. Until the day that Arthur and Dom wake up from the dream, earlier than expected, and there are tears streaked down Mal's face as she stands over them, her hand in the briefcase, Phillipa is crying crying crying at her feet. Dom is up in a second, scooping up his daughter and asking, "What's wrong, honey why are you crying? Why is she crying?" as she buries her face in his collar.

"Her finger got caught in the door," Mal says, babbles something, barely intelligible and French. Remembers herself, says, "You wouldn't wake up," and Arthur can feel his heart beat, thump thump thump, as he stands there, because today it is just a finger but tomorrow—

And he isn't thinking about all the things that could happen tomorrow. He's thinking about protocol. He is thinking about the fact that a sedative makes the dream stable, but that there are side effects they need to take into account before furthering their research.

Dom takes Phillipa to the car and Mal grabs James from his crib, and the four of them go to the doctor. Phillipa is fine. There is a large bruise under her fingernail and the doctor says it will probably fall off, that it may grow back a little crooked but she'll be just fine. Arthur finds this out over the phone, in his apartment that has never felt like a home. He doesn't sleep.

xxx

Arthur is the one they send down into the dream. There's a few seconds of awkwardness as they individually work through the idea of Arthur going alone, and Cobb finally just says "It makes more sense to have an extra pair of hands here." It's not like Arthur was going to argue anyway. He just shrugs, pulls a face that's almost comically young - or maybe just more appropriate for how old he actually is - and sits down in the chair. They're in the middle of the kitchen with a pitcher of water waiting on the counter. A bullhorn. All of it's sort of ridiculously obvious, but without any starting point to build off they have to make one up. This is as good as a base line as any.

Cobb unwinds the iv and hands it off to Arthur who slides the needle points precisely into his upturned wrist, guided by the scars. Mal bounces baby James on her hip; he won't go down for his afternoon nap.

"Ready?" Cobb asks.

"Just try not to blow out my eardrums." He settles in the ladder back dining chair, the soles of his shoes sliding on the towels underfoot.

The last thing he sees after Dom pushes the compression flange is Mal smiling at him, shifting the baby onto her other hip. He only catches half of what she says - "He'll be careful, Arthur…" - and the next thing he knows, he's standing on a vibrantly patterned carpet, slot machines humming around him. Sound of coins. There's a row of televisions broadcasting dog racing from Florida.

Arthur gets a drink at the casino bar, drinks it with purpose and waits. At worst, he has an hour.

It takes time, but somewhere near the half hour mark, he realizes that the buzzing sound in the back of his head isn't actually coming from the speaker system or from any of the machines. He turns on the barstool and looks over the casino, trying not to actually look at any of the people playing the slots. He dreads recognizing someone. Bullhorn, he suddenly realizes.

Ten minutes later it starts to rain. Inside.

Arthur jumps the bar and sits under the ledge with the bartender who is wearing a red vest. He finishes his drink and steels himself to wait for the sedation to wear off, socks soggy, clothes clinging to him, hair going curly near his ears.

"Crazy weather, huh?"

He doesn't look sideways at first, stares at the strip of skin he can see between the end of his pant leg and the top of his sock. Slowly, he turns and looks at the bartender. His gin and tonic is loose in his fingers. "What?"

"I said, 'crazy weather,'" his father answers, "Your mother'll kill you if you ruin that suit."

Opens his mouth to say something - has no goddamn idea what - and the dream lurches suddenly. He thinks he might be sick and—

It takes him a minute to realize, but he's on the floor of the kitchen, still groggy from what's left of the mild sedative. He rubs his face dumbly and realizes he's wet, the dark blue dress shirt stuck to his chest. He starts to unbutton it and then stops, blinking up at Mal and Dom who are looking down at him, saying something.

"-thur, are you alright?" Mal is asking.

"I-, what did you do?"

"I pushed over your chair," says Cobb.

"After he slapped you." She's glaring at her husband, and if it wasn't for the baby Arthur's pretty sure Cobb would have a black eye by now.

"Well," can hear himself - voice all thick. "It worked." He has his arm under him, levering himself up off the floor.

They nickname it the kick for obvious reasons.

It works really well. They do a bit of legitimate testing, most of which, unfortunately, involves kicking Arthur's chair over. It makes sense, the spin of vertigo is like falling out of your bed. You never hit the ground in your dream. They hypothesize other things might work - you never drown in a dream either, but Arthur only raises an eyebrow and they all agree that it can wait until later. For now they have what they need to move onto inception. Mostly. Unfortunately it is clear they're going to need test subjects before they go any further.

They remember all their dreams. You can't remember your dreams and still have inception work. You can't really know too much about shared dreaming and have inception work. Which means that Arthur has more paperwork to fill out and Mal and Dom have more people to charm before they get what they really need. When they do, it's simple. A small advert at the back of the newspaper: Independent Paid Sleep Study. It's more than enough to drum up test subjects, mostly college kids looking for some spending cash. They carefully weed out the more unsuitable applicants. They all have different ways of dealing with the process. Arthur just hands them the daunting pile of release forms with a stern look and monosyllabic answers to their shaky questions, intimidating them with the sheer number of required signatures and how fine some of the print is. Dom goes in, guns blazing, makes it sound exciting and dangerous and is, perhaps, a bit intense for some people. They end up letting Mal handle most of the initiation process, her charming accent and maybe slightly low cut shirt making everything go a little bit smoother. She laughs away fears and reassures them and points to the little x's that need signatures or initials with elegant fingers.

They are building off of other people's research, which truth be told hasn't gotten very far. There is a fine line they have to dance, getting people to believe something hard enough to remember it when they wake up, but not being so forceful that it feels wrong. They start simple. They go in and have conversations, trying to guide the person to draw a conclusion. Then they wake them up and they ask them questions - how do you feel about this or that - based on the questionnaires until they get to the question they really want to ask. The person answers. Sometimes they don't answer the way they expect them to. Sometimes they do, but seem hesitant or change their minds. It never really works and they can only use each test subject once. At the end of the day the three of them sit down and devise new ways to try and get the result they want. They talk to the subject's subconscious, they leave physical clues, they tell a story. And none of it works. They have to take Dom off of interviews because he starts getting a little too intense, almost yells, "What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know?"

xxx

They are running out of ideas. It's getting frustrating, and they all know they've hit a wall. They have tried to plant more and more simple things, have polished the ideas down to the purest form, but still have no way to make a person believe it completely. There is always a seed of doubt and that isn't acceptable.

Dom is in the office cleaning up from the day's tests. Shoving blueprints back into tubes and ignoring the stack of filled out consent forms that are a reminder of how long they've been at this unsuccessfully. Mal and Arthur are on the back porch. They are drinking wine out of mismatched mugs as James naps in his converted car seat and Phillipa has a tea party with her stuffed animals. Arthur's knees are drawn up nearly to his chest, and Mal digs her toes into the grass. They are quiet in their own thoughts until she starts laughing, a sudden bark that turns into something longer, and Arthur can feel the corners of his own mouth turn up, huffs laughter out of his nose.

"Ideas ideas ideas," she says, sets her mug down and rubs her cheek. "Yelled, right in his face," she continues, trailing off into giggles.

Arthur is smiling wider than he has in a long time. For all of his jabs at Van de Berg, Dom's final solution hadn't been much better, standing in front of the test subject, practically yelling "You want ice cream!" in his face.

The kid had asked, surprised, "I do?"

"Yes, you do. It's delicious, and you want some," Dom had said, doing that scary eyebrow thing he did so well. Arthur and Mal had given each other identical looks as the timer ran out.

"It was something else. It deserves to be framed," Arthur says, a smirk in his voice, "And hung in a museum."

"That would be lovely," Mal hums, grinning through her fingers. They can hear Dom slamming books around through the window. They give each other another highly amused look as he opens the back door, leaning on the handle with his brows drawn low.

"Here," he says, throws Arthur's phone at him. He fumbles it awkwardly, and it falls in the grass before he finally manages to grab it.

"It was buzzing," Dom says by way of an answer, frowns at them again like he thinks they're conspiring against him. Mal grins back, bright, and the corner of Dom's mouth twitches before he goes back inside.

Arthur has the phone cradled between his hands, sees the number and presses the button to listen to his voicemail as Mal gathers up their mugs and heads back inside to talk to her husband. Arthur's elbows are on his knees and the knot on his tie is pulled low as he puts the phone to his ear. He watches Phillipa set her stuffed shark upright in its little chair as his mother's voice tell him that his father is dead.

xxx

Sacramento isn't exactly how he remembers it, but he's not honestly sure he ever had a great picture of it in the first place. Arthur moved a lot when he was a kid, lived in California through all of high school when he was too poor to own a car and was friends with people who didn't like to drive, didn't really like to go anywhere. So the memories are scarce even if the roads themselves are mostly familiar as the taxi winds its way to his mother's house where he unloads his small suitcase and pays the driver in crumpled bills. He hasn't been home for longer than a week since his second year in school which is when he stopped coming back for the summers. Hasn't set foot inside the house since his third. There were the prerequisite phone calls - birthdays and Christmases, sometimes a little late or sometimes a little early. Better if he got the answering machine instead of one of his parents – he could say Happy Birthday or Easter or whatever without the added weight of pleasant conversation. What he was doing at work and was he seeing anyone. Not much and no; since getting hired by the Cobbs', Arthur hadn't done much besides work. Its not something he thinks about either until his mother brings it up over coffee, sitting in the living room like he's a stranger or a visiting neighbor, "You're obsessed with your job. You should take a vacation, stay here a little longer."

He doesn't have a return flight booked, but the idea of staying in the house for long makes Arthur's skin crawl. It's too quiet and his mother, whose hair is going grey and whose hands twisted around the coffee mug, looks tiny on the couch across the room. "We'll see," he says. Except that all he can think about is that it smells dusty and he has dirt on the bottom of his shoes from stepping in a puddle in the airport gutter, and that the wall clock is loud. Since working for the Cobbs, he's gotten used to slick, flawless designs; the wallpaper looks old and tacky.

And he doesn't know what to say. His mother puts him in his old room, which has boxes and things that don't belong to him stored against the wall and in the closet and under the bed, but it's almost better that way than if it was pristine, perfectly preserved. She says goodnight, but Arthur catches her in the hall before she gets all the way to her room. He gives her an awkward hug with his too-long arms. "I'm sorry," and she cries a little with her hands over her face and her knuckles against his shirt.

He stays up late. Cleans all the dishes in the sink, finds a bottle of white zinfandel in the fridge. Drinks it out of a glass at first but then takes a few swigs from the bottle itself before putting it away - too sweet. Goes to bed at three in the morning when he's too tired to stand, he barely makes it to his room and lays down in the same clothes he wore on the plane. Sleeps on his stomach.

It takes a while to get things in order, but Arthur has gotten good at talking to people he doesn't know. Good at logistics. Talks to the funeral home director in blunt, unsparing terms with his mother sitting in the chair next to him.

"Do you want to see your father before you go?" the director, who has a long nose and crooked front teeth, asks.

"No." The thought of seeing him laying on a freezer slab is, right then, more frightening than anything else in the world. They go home and they watch television - which Arthur hasn't bothered to do in months. He helps his mother clean out closets and he goes through his father's desk alone when she's asleep, not really sure what he's looking for but unsatisfied when he doesn't find it. He books a flight for two days after the memorial service, says he's sorry but that he really can't stay longer. Arthur talks to the neighbors, talks to his mother's friends from church. It's the most he's spoken in the past year, possibly his entire life.

On Friday, a late model sedan pulls into the driveway and a young man holding a small cardboard box slides out of the drivers seat. Arthur assumes it's a pie or a casserole, more food to be wrestled into the overflowing fridge. He walks out to meet him, catches him before he reaches the step.

It's not what he's expecting. The man hands him the box, asks if he has the right family. Arthur answers with a mechanical, "That's right," and signs for it. He takes it inside and stands in the hall for a long collection of seconds.

The box is small, unassuming, roughly eight by twelve inches, feels too heavy. He opens it, discards the cardboard in favor of the unmarked black plastic container inside.

"Who was that?" his mother calls from the kitchen. The sink is running.

Starts to talk, has to clear his throat. "It's Dad," he says.

He calls the house that evening, doesn't think about the time difference until it's too late, apologizes when Mal picks up. "I'll be back on the twelfth," is all he really tells her and Mal doesn't say anything remotely close to 'You could stay' or 'Take a few days' which is the last thing he wants to hear.

Arthur says something at the memorial service, but later won't remember what - just that the microphone on the podium was broken and that there were more people there than he expected. He doesn't know how to ask his mother for what he wants, so he doesn't, and they bury the ashes in the church garden in a hole dug out of the ivy.

Cleaning house isn't something he's particularly good at, but he's okay at throwing things out, so that's the job he's given. He rolls up his shirt sleeves and takes bags to the garbage, stacks other bins in the hall so they can be taken to the Salvation Army when his mother starts being okay with it.

They clean and they eat cold casserole and lasagna, and on the day his flight leaves Arthur says goodbye early and gets a taxi to take him out to the racetrack. They're actually on the freeway, crossing over the river en route when Arthur decides it's a stupid idea. Tells the cabbie to just take him to the airport where he sits in the terminal and waits the extra two hours until his flight comes in.

He booked the cheapest return flight, one layover for about 45 minutes and then a straight shot back to New York. The layover is in Vegas, but there had been absolutely no reason for that to bother him. He hadn't thought about the first time his father had taken him there, or the second. He hadn't thought about the trip he had ducked out on during college. And he doesn't think about much of anything during the hour and twenty minute flight from Sacramento to Las Vegas. When he gets off the plane he is struck more than anything by the smell, or lack thereof. That is what he remembered most from his childhood memories - heavy cigarette smoke and cheap beer. Now it just smells like pretty much any airport, like the food court and people. He rolls the die in his palm as he checks the reader board, walks slowly to the terminal to prove he isn't running. 14C, twenty five minutes until boarding. He sits down, pulls his carryon up next to him. Taps his foot as he looks out the grand windows and watches a big plane take off. All around him the ambient noise is like some parody of the Vegas he remembers, the hum of people and the chime of fake coins from the digital slot machines causing him to recall the facsimile of the Charles River Basin. He pulls the die out of his pocket again, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger for a moment before tucking it back into his other pocket. He's scowling; he can feel the lines in his forehead, the tension between his eyes. His face smoothes slightly as he scrubs the palm of his hand over his forehead and tries to relax, as much as he ever does. He finally looks back around the terminal, taps his fingers over the handle of his rolling luggage as he takes it all in. Stands up and walks over to the row of small slots along the far wall, the click-clacking of the his suit case's wheels following him.

The seats are the same faded vinyl they've always been - flecks of glitter like gold, a promise of things to come. He fishes a five out of his wallet, feeds it into the machine. Slots are mostly luck. They don't take any skill beyond knowing how much to bet. Other than that it's a waiting game, deciding when to move on, when to stay, whether the machine is on a losing streak or just about to pay out big. He hits the buttons automatically. Here, wedged in the corner and surrounded by fading brass and the candy-bright sounds of the machines things feel far more familiar. The smell of faded tobacco that never quite washes out, buttons worn smooth from countless fingers. On the screen colorful pictographs click into line, one, two, three four, ding ding ding, the machine plays a cheerful song, simulates the sound of coins dropping into a trough. Ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching, the machine says, $10,000 jackpot. He stares blankly as the machine adds the numbers to his initial five dollars one at a time. A woman two machines to his left leans over, with a face that speaks of every year it had seen, gaudy bright makeup on washed out skin, and says to him, "You're a damn lucky kid, I've been at this all day and only won $40. The most I ever won in Vegas was $1,200. I won $2,000 once in Reno, though."

He looks at her, uncomprehending as the machine continues its payout. One of the assistants comes over to him, fakes a smile and congratulates him. If he wants to cash out, she can help him at the counter.

Ten minutes before he gets back on a plane to New York he is handed a check with $10,000 on it. He puts it in his wallet behind his gold card and thanks the woman automatically. He sleeps the entire flight home.