Too many one shot ideas, too many, so I decided to put them all together chronologically in one place. So here is there first part, and it comes with some serious darkness warnings (obviously, given when it must be set, right?)

So don't read this if you've not read La Vie En Rose (go check out my profile/story list if you haven't) because it won't make sense, it's full of spoilers for the main story and it's only a companion piece, not a sequel or anything. Each chapter is its own little one shot, they don't necessarily follow each other except that I'm posting them mostly chronologically. And! I am totally taking prompts and requests for these series of one shots, I can't say they'll get posted immediately but I will write anything you want to see, so long as it doesn't contradict anything else I've written. Hit me up with a review/PM on here or on my shiny new Tumblr account (username pplleessiioossaauurr).

Content Warning: drugs references, implied domestic violence, not very graphic het sex, violence, murder threats, graphic injury, children in pain.

"I'm scared, Robert. He came home covered in someone else's blood last night and he's getting suspicious, every time I go out he asks where I've been and who I've been with. It's like he can smell you on me. He makes me do things I don't want to, terrible things. Please, you have to arrest him soon."

Robert Earle slid his arms around Claudia again and let her rest her lovely head against his broad chest. It was risky meeting in public like that but it wasn't too likely that anyone was looking for a former glamour model and her police officer lover hiding out in the back room of a cheap café at a funfair.

"We need to have enough solid evidence to make sure he goes away for good, darling. I promise, as soon as we can prove he ordered the hits on Marinesko and Zhukov we'll move but you know it needs to be watertight. We can't risk him wriggling out of it." he replied. It broke his heart to hear Claudia so distraught but if they rushed the investigation the whole thing would fall apart and Abadeer would walk free.

"I'm scared he's going to do something, hurt me or the children. He's taken Marshall with him someplace today and he said it wasn't any of my concern what they were doing. What is he making my sweet boy do, Robert? He's turning my beautiful son into a miniature version of himself. And Marcy found one of his bags of cocaine last week, what if she'd swallowed some? I put it back before he found her; he'd have beaten her so badly if he knew. I want that monster out of my children's lives!"

She burst into tears and he held her tighter, kissed her forehead and murmured soothingly to her. Outside in the funfair little Marcy was having a birthday treat with her eccentric uncle, she had no idea her mother was using the occasion to met her lover and pass on more information.

"Robert, please." Claudia murmured, tilting her head up to stare imploringly into his eyes. He knew what those words meant, what she was asking for. It wasn't anything to do with his role as her police handler anymore. Robert let her kiss him, slide her hands over his chest and fumble the buttons of his shirt open. When she dropped to her knees and nuzzled him through his trousers he almost went dizzy from the aching need for her.

Claudia was everything he'd ever wanted in a woman, probably the only woman he'd ever be able to love now. She was so beautiful that she lit up the room when she walked in, so fragile and vulnerable, she made him feel so strong because she needed him. Distantly Robert was aware that there was probably a lot wrong with thinking of her like that, probably the militant feminist types would say that he was objectifying her. But Claudia was softness and elegance, she was feminine desire and she made him feel like so much more of a man. A few minutes later when the crucial moment overcame them both and she shuddered against him he knew it was his strength and masculinity that affected her, knew he gave her something that her cruel beast of a husband never had.

He was zipping up his flies when there was a knock on the door. The owners of the café had been quite excited to allow their room to be used for official police business and they'd been so impressed when he'd mentioned that they were now part of the Official Secrets Act. It was all bullshit of course but it was getting difficult to find time to be alone with her.

"Mum! Uncle Simon wants to go on a Ferris Wheel!" a child's voice squealed excitedly from outside. Claudia pressed one last hungry kiss onto his lips before she opened to door and caught the little girl who came running into her arms.

"That sounds wonderful, baby! Oh, who's this handsome fellow then?" she cooed, picking up her daughter and nodding to the red teddy bear she was holding.

"He's called Hambo and Uncle Simon won him for me on the crane machine! Can we go on the Ferris Wheel now, Mum? Please? Who's that?" the little girl added breathlessly, staring over her mother's shoulder at Robert.

"He's called Rob and he's one of my friends from when I used to be in pretty pictures, baby. Say hello." Claudia told her with a tense glance around at where Simon was leaning in the doorway staring at them with a disapproving expression on his face.

"Hello." Marcy said quietly. "Did you used to do pictures of my Mum?"

"Yeah, that's right kid. I used to do the pictures." Robert lied uncomfortably. The little girl looked like a perfect minute of her mother; it was weird to see Claudia's eyes staring back at him from the face of a small child when he was so used to seeing the way they rolled back into her head when she came. He shook his head; it was just something he was going to have to get used to.

"Hey Marcy, why don't you and your Mum go get some tickets for the Ferris Wheel, huh? I need to talk to her friend for a minute." Simon spoke up unexpectedly. That didn't bode well at all.

Claudia shot him a concerned look but did as her brother instructed and let her daughter tug her out of the room by the hand, still talking at a hundred miles an hour about all the rides they were going to go on together. Once they were out of sight Simon whirled on the young police officer, suddenly crackling with an icy rage.

"So you're fucking my baby sister in the back room of some dirty cheap café on her daughter's birthday now, Earle? You're just as bad as he is." the older man growled.

"Hey, it's the lady's choice. I can't help that she can't keep her hands off me. Besides she likes the feel of a real man, not the kind of limp dicked gangster scum your family throws out." It was worth it to see the impotent fury in Simon's eyes; Robert was still feeling smug and superior from getting Claudia off. She made him feel like he could have wrestled lions single handed.

But perhaps the other man's fury wasn't so impotent after all. Simon lashed out with a lightening fast left hook that was as powerful as it was unexpected, far too quick to dodge or block. Robert rolled with the punch but he tasted blood nonetheless; he remembered far too late that Simon had been an amateur middleweight boxing champion back in his younger days.

"Don't you talk about my sister that way ever again, Earle. She gets enough abuse from the scumbag she married. Looks like Claudia's type is the sort of man who treats her like a disposable sex toy, more's the pity. But I'm telling you now, boy. You ever lay a hand on her in anger, you ever even raise your voice to her or disrespect her again in any way and you'll have me to deal with. And I have spent a lot of years carefully cultivating a non-threatening image; bumbling academic and harmless sweet uncle. You cross me, hurt my family, you'll find out how much of that harmless image is just for show. Never forget that I grew up in the family every bit as much as men like Hunson Abadeer did."

Simon looked him over coldly before he leaned in and growled right into Robert's face;

"I know more than one place to dispose of a body, Earle. I chose the academic life but if you give me a single good reason I'll gladly go back to being a gangster for just the one night. You remember that, and remember I'll be watching you. You understand me?"

Robert nodded slowly, yeah he understood perfectly. Simon nodded back coldly then he turned and strode from the room after his sister and niece leaving Robert to stare after him and massage his aching jaw. Perhaps it would be worth adding Simon to the investigation, he thought for a moment. But he dismissed that idea immediately; as annoying and unexpectedly threatening as the older man was Robert needed all the allies he could get inside the family if he was going to end them for good. And so long as he played nice and treated Claudia like the princess she was they wouldn't have any more problems. He could do that; he'd been intending to from the very start.

...

Detective Inspector Robert Earle had plenty of time to think back over that last encounter with Simon the night he stood watch by Marceline's hospital bed four months later. They had her on a morphine drip, as much as her tiny body could handle, but she still whimpered in her sleep from the agony of her burns. It was a long ragged char that stretched from the side of her neck all the way down to the top of her hips; red and blistered in places, white and waxy where the burns were worse. There were one or two spots where they'd taken whole sections of her skin away because it had been completely destroyed, all the way through to the meat underneath. The doctors were trying to decide where was best to take a skin graft from to repair those places; probably the undamaged parts of her upper arms and shoulders. She'd never look the same again, Earle knew. Abadeer had forever destroyed his daughter's chances of growing into a miniature Claudia.

DCI Garda had gone to the morgue with Bolshakov to identify the bodies. As much as it grated to work with the crooked lawyer he was the only family member that they could contact that night. Abadeer was still missing but every able bodied officer in the Greater London area was out looking for him. Not Earle, though. Earle was standing guard by little Marcy's bed and while his face was every bit as professional and impassive as anyone could expect on the inside he was shredding himself to pieces. Claudia was dead. Her son was dead too, and her sister in law. But Claudia was the one Abadeer had been after. Earle thought hazily through the numb ache of loss and horror still filling him that he might ask Simon about those places where a body could be safely hidden, that men like Hunson Abadeer didn't deserve to face justice. He deserved nothing more than the coldest, cruellest revenge. Something much more primal and primitive than Earle's civilized sense of justice or morals was howling inside his head like a caged beast. For the first time in his life Earle understood what could drive a man to torture another human being to death in cold blood. Perhaps he'd never understood hatred until that night; or the soul deep grief of losing someone he had been hopelessly in love with. Knowing that her last moments must have been spent in crippling agony and terror, that all his promises to her had been broken in the most horrifying ways.

And there was still Marceline. She was innocent, fragile, every bit as helpless as her mother had been. And she was half of his Claudia; for a moment Earle let his hand reach out and gently touch the silk of her hair. It was identical to her mother's. Every bit as soft and whisper fine as Claudia's magnificent mane had been; whoever her future lovers would be they'd no doubt find just as much hypnotic amazement in sliding their fingers through that hair as he had with Claudia.

But she was half of Abadeer too. Half her father's daughter, half tainted by his blood. Her tiny face twisted in pain again and she cried out in her sleep and Earle felt an entirely different impulse spread through him. Half Abadeer, and what could hurt the father more than the loss of his entire line? It would be the work of a moment to open the feed on the drip much wider and flood her fragile body with a lethal dose of morphine. It might even be a kindness, let her drift away in a medicated sleep and never know that Earle had let them all down, had let her beloved mother burn.

"Robert?"

He turned reluctantly. DCI Garda was staring at him from the doorway.

"Robert, you look exhausted. You shift finished four hours ago, why are you still here? Go home and sleep, take tomorrow off. The nurses said she won't wake up until tomorrow anyway and you'll need to wait for the specialist social workers to arrive before you can interview her. I know how much this case means to you but there's nothing else to be done tonight."

It ached to hear anyone call him by his given name; that was what Claudia had called him. And how could Earle explain that he'd been wondering if the kindest thing to do for little Marceline was to mercy kill her? He just shook his head and slouched from the room. Earle had no idea how he made it home, he was too numb. But he found himself lying on his bed in his small apartment staring at the ceiling with a bottle of whiskey in his hands. He'd take the next day off but they couldn't stop him going back to the hospital.

….

Agony like she'd never known was what brought her around and Marceline woke with a sharp cry. Nurses she didn't recognise fussed around her and she was in a strange white room with Winnie The Pooh murals on the walls and lots of weird looking equipment next to the big bed they'd put her in. And oh God, there was a tube going into her hand, the horror, something was going into her and she tried to pull it out but the nurses grabbed her hands to stop her and she screamed again-

"It's ok, darling. I'm right here."

Uncle Simon was sitting by her bed, but when she looked at him his arms were bandaged right from the middle of his biceps to the tips of his fingers.

"S-simon!" she sobbed, reaching out for him. He came and crouched by her face, letting her wrap her hands comfortingly in his shaggy greying hair. "Where's Mum?"

Simon's face was shining with tears; Marcy tried to think but she didn't know if she'd ever seen him cry before.

"I'm so sorry, darling. Your Mum got too badly hurt in the fire and she went up to heaven to live with the angels. She didn't want to be lonely so Marshall and Betty went too. But I'm here, and I'm not going away, ok? I'm here for you."

She hadn't really understood what he was talking about, still drowsy and confused from the pain medication. So instead of grieving for her family the next words out of Marcy's mouth were;

"Is Hambo here?"

"Yeah darling, I brought your special teddy. He's right there in the bed with you, he was keeping you safe all night. The nurses are gonna give you something for the pain and you're gonna go back to sleep, you weren't supposed to wake up yet. But I'll be here when you wake, ok?"

She nodded; it was already beginning to get too hard to keep her eyes open. And when she did wake it was dark again and Simon was there in the chair by her bed like he'd promised, fast asleep. But he wasn't alone.

"Hello Pumpkin." Daddy said quietly. "I need you to be real quiet, ok? We're gonna go away together, just you and me. I've got something for your pain, it's gonna make it all better. Much better than the doctors can give you, alright? It's a special kinda medicine, you gotta sniff it up through your nose."

He held out a piece of card with a thin white line of powder on it and she shrunk away instinctively. Daddy's eyes looked scary, too big and weird like the time she'd accidentally found him taking his grown up medicine in the kitchen. That medicine was just for grown ups and she wasn't supposed to take it, he'd told her so many times. So she shook her head and tried to back away from him into the pillows, He frowned and shoved the card under her nose and without thinking about it she shoved it away, spilling the powder in his face and making him explode with rage.

"YOU FUCKING LITTLE-"

But whatever he'd been about to call her was cut off with a crunch. Simon was awake, Simon was sobbing around the pain of punching Daddy as hard as he could in the side of the head with his damaged hands. And then the door of the room burst open and the police man was there, dragging Daddy to his feet and screaming at him.

"Hunson Fucking Abadeer, I am arresting you on suspicion of arson and murder, you do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. You fucking piece of shit."

And that was the last time Marceline saw her father for fifteen years. It was the last time she spoke a word directly to anyone for five months and the last time she saw her mother's lover before she was sitting across from him in an interview room telling him she wanted to turn informant. Not that she recognised Earle that day or even really remembered it much. It all felt like some distant medicated dream, like so many of her other weird dreams in the hospital. Simon remembered it though, and Earle remembered. When Hunson stood up in court to confirm his name and address a couple of months later one of the crimes he was found guilty of was attempting to deliver a controlled substance to a minor. Before he built a safe reputation for himself in prison he took a knife to the stomach from an inmate whose daughter had died of a drugs overdose, he almost bled to death in his first week there. Even the other hardened rapists and murderers wouldn't tolerate a child abuser.

….

"Ein Apfel."

"Very good honey, and this one?"

"Eine Kartoffel."

"Excellent. This one?"

"Um…"

"It's a pear, honey. What do you call a pear in German?"

"Traube?"

"No sweetie, eine Traube is a grape. It's eine Birne."

Bonnie nodded and stared harder at the flash cards. She was going to be the very best German speaker ever and then she'd make lots of German friends at her new school. She hoped they'd be nicer than the kids at her English school, they just called her a ginger teacher's pet and one of them had thrown her favourite scarf in the toilet. She hated those kids with all the intensity a six year old could.

"What do you want for lunch, honey?" her Mum asked. Bonnie thought for a second.

"Pasta!" she yelled, excited. Bonnie didn't like pasta so much but it was her little brother's favourite and she liked hearing him make happy noises when he ate.

"In German?"

"Umm… die Nudeln!"

"Excellent! I'll go get it started, you keep an eye on your brother."

Neddy was sitting in his corner with his back turned drawing. Bonnie crept over to him and sat by his side, looking at the scribbling he'd spent all morning on.

"These are really good. You're such a good boy." she told him supportively. Ned didn't appear to have heard her, he was busy drawing pink circles. Sheet after sheet of paper were covered in them, just pink circles as neat as he could make them. Each one had a smaller darker pink circle in the middle. Bonnie stared harder at it and felt her face heat up with an embarrassed giggle.

"Neddy, are you drawing boobies?" she asked him around her delighted six year old's horror. He giggled and shot her a look out of the corner of his eye.

"That's really naughty, Neddy! If Mum finds out she'll be cross!" Bonnie gasped. "But I won't tell. I'll tell her they're pink oranges, ok?"

He gurgled happily in reply and drew a much bigger pink circle and then another and held it out proudly for his sister.

"Oh, are these ones for me? Because I'm a girl and girls have boobies. That's so rude, Neddy!"

But Bonnie took the drawing anyway and folded it into the pocket of her little pink dungarees. Even if it was rude and very naughty and Mum would be really cross about it she was always happy when Neddy drew things for her. He put down his pens and reached out to pet her hair. Bonnie slid onto the floor so he could reach more easily and let him stroke her pigtails.

"We're going away to Germany soon, Neddy." she told him conversationally. "Dad has a new job working on the airplanes and I'm learning to speak German. But you're coming too. Mum says there's a nice special school you can go to and the teachers there speak English too so you'll be able to understand them. And I'm going to a new school and I hope they have lots of nice kids who like reading stories. I'm going to take all my books and learn how to translate them into German and read them for the German kids so they can listen to English stories too. Do you think they know about Pippi Longstocking in Germany?"

Ned gurgled again and Bonnie smiled, understanding every word he'd never learned to say.

"I'm glad you're my best friend too, Neddy." she replied happily.