I've been watching all the really old SW's on Drama and couldn't let this one go by without a bit of FF. So dear readers cast your minds back… back in time before Leo died and Harry left, before Hungary and Shadows, even before the time they go to that airshow and imagine the Harry and Nikki back then, two years in. Nikki's asked Harry when he last had sex in the back of his car, he knows about her previous dodgy choice in men and her father, they've shared the "You're being liked," conversation and held hands but not much else until Leo sends them both off to a pathology conference where they skip the lecture on "Learning to Love the Liver," and find a pub instead. Watch the SW highlights for season 10 and you'll be right up to speed.

All characters and situations you recognise belong to the BBC following on from Body of Work.

For Tigpop who blames Penny for everything and because she knows what she has to do now…..

In Another Life by Dinabar

Chapter One

Attention To Detail

Nikki had felt it once before, she'd been a teenager then. Her ears had popped and suddenly there dangling from the cabin's ceiling panel was a yellow oxygen mask. She'd looked in confusion to her right to where her father was sitting, he was already placing his mask over his face, he tipped his head towards hers and she followed his lead. As she was tightening the straps to fit her small face she heard him pull back his mask and say,

"Well Niks, neither of us will fancy going back now. Not after this flight."

That was when the plane had dropped 10,000 feet in seconds and it had taken her a decade before she was ready to stomach the flight back to South Africa. She'd never forgotten that sense of panic, the sick realisation that nothing would be the same again and the eerie silence of the masked passengers.

It wasn't possible for a small observation room in a London police station to depressurise or drop 10,000 feet but the physiological impact seemed identical. She was breathing but the oxygen just didn't seem to be getting to her brain, she felt sick, numb at the finger tips. She didn't believe what she was hearing but one look at her silent co-worker standing to her right, staring through the glass at Max Wheaton confirmed it. This time there would be no oxygen mask to save her, the seconds were ticking. She wasn't a child anymore; it wasn't her father in the seat next to her either; it was Harry and instead of helping her, he was the cause of her terror. Somehow it was as if he had made the pressure drop, sucking all the available air into himself.

Something would implode or explode; it was a fundamental scientific law. Newton's third law of motion discovered centuries ago and acted out before her. An equal and opposite reaction to the confessions of that step-father sat calmly, behind the desk just metres away with a sly smile playing at his lips and the silent rage of her colleague.

She sucked in another breath, desperate to relieve the hypoxia, watched her colleague move; not much, just a flex of his fingers against the glass. She knew he'd heard. In silence Harry Cunningham stared at his rival. Nikki waited; she bit down on her fingers, touched her hair, anything to distract herself from the impending crash.

It came as suddenly as the altitude drop on that plane so many years ago, his hand hit the window, his fist punched the door and then he gave a desperate guttural cry,

Harry collapsed the remaining six feet to the floor and with a sob curled himself into the smallest shape possible for a man of his size with the knowledge that nothing would be the same again.

Descending to a safer altitude was the only strategy for cabin depressurisation and Nikki did the only thing she could; she got down on the floor with him, cradled his arm and told him it wasn't his fault. Despite his behaviour this week she couldn't stand by and watch this emotional collapse and do nothing.

And his behaviour had been terrible, personally and professionally. The only reason she could see that Leo hadn't disciplined him was because Harry hadn't spent long enough at the Lyell for their paths to coincide.

Had her behaviour been better? She wished she could pretend that she hadn't enjoyed telling Harry of her theory that Simon was the son and not the lover, and then later of his death but there was something this week that made the sense of Schadenfreude wholly satisfying.

She'd enjoyed the triumphant feeling that it was her results, her attention to the detail of the actual evidence not Harry's knee jerk reactions and suppositions that had solved this case. But to see him like this. He had always been the dominant one, in the two years she had known him; he had always been the one in control, the one doing what he always said he would do; the one in charge. There was nothing she could say, no words that would help so instead she kept quiet and laid her head on his shoulder; tried to breathe deeply and remembered the dread silence of that juddering plane journey from another lifetime ago.

"You're so good always. Why are men….?" Harry broke off and looked her in the eye humbly for the first time in days.

"Women have been known to commit the odd sin," she'd muttered; the equal and opposite reaction still playing on her mind.

"I've got to go," he'd said suddenly and there she was; alone, on the floor and having orders barked at her again.

"Where are you going?" The words hung meaninglessly in the air between them. She knew she'd get no answer.

"Test everything you can think of at the Wheaton's house for Dosulepen!"

'Bastard!' she thought he might just as well have asked her for a hockey stick and ball. This still wasn't over.

"Bastard!" she shouted at the sound of his retreating footsteps.

I was having angst withdrawal, hope there are still some angst lovers out there... pop by and say Hi.