3.54. Charles James checked the green numbers on the clock radio and heaved a deeply frustrated sigh, it was still the middle of the fucking night and it was pitch dark outside with the sound of heavy rain beating against the window and he was wide awake. He knew that no matter how hard he tried he wouldn't be able to drop off again, that sleep was over for another night. The insomnia had started some four months ago when the world as he knew it had come crashing down around his ears, leaving him in limbo waiting with a vain hope for something that now looked increasing unlikely to happen, and he wasn't sure how he'd cope if the unthinkable came true and he had to accept this situation as the reality of his life.

Eleven months ago he had thought he was the happiest bloke on the planet. Okay, he'd still missed being in the army, he probably always would, but his injuries meant that it would never have been the same again anyway, and his role as Mr. Fix it for a large multi-national company had turned out to be more than he could have possibly have dreamt of when he was first appointed. The company bought struggling U.K. businesses, often family run operations, then Charles and his team went in and either turned them around so that they became successful and profitable, usually with a lot of streamlining and judicial investment or they closed them down completely. He knew that his nickname was the 'hatchet man' but he reasoned that some of the staff kept their jobs which they wouldn't have done if the companies had gone bust, which was often all too likely. Not only had he found a new role which he was satisfyingly shit-hot at, but he couldn't believe his luck when he'd got married to Rebecca, tall and slim, she was blonde and beautiful and just about the coolest and classiest woman he'd ever met.

His team worked as a well-oiled machine, his years as an officer in the army had made him an excellent team leader, and his ability to formulate strategic plans was outstanding. He'd initially had some difficulty with the over-familiarity that Samantha the H.R. specialist had shown her new boss, but his impending marriage to the girl of his dreams had made him immune to her flirting and suggestive behaviour, so that eventually she'd given up and now treated him like any other colleague. The other two were male, so Robbie, the finance guy, and Stan the I.T. specialist had always just treated him as the boss, in fact all three now called him Boss, which gave him a warm feeling of familiarity from his army days.

He knew that they were finding him increasingly difficult to work with since his private life had all gone to shit, he was irritable and impatient and had become even more ruthless, they didn't understand because he hadn't told them what'd happened, he was still clinging to the hope that it would all sort itself out and that they'd never need to know. He especially didn't want Samantha to find out that Rebecca had left him, he didn't want to have to cope with a return to the behaviour of the early days without his wife as a human shield.

The first few months of their marriage had been great, more than great, perfect, or at least he'd thought so, she'd spent a small fortune doing up the house they'd bought in Richmond, turning it into a trendy modern minimalist tribute to interior fashion, and then, when she'd got bored with that, she'd gone out and bought a Tibetan Water Spaniel, which had some long and, as far as Charles was concerned stupid, kennel name, so he called him Parsnip. At the time he'd been a little concerned to find that Parsnip, an adorably cute puppy, was very, very hairy and needed a whole lot of careful grooming, because he was beginning to realise that Rebecca had a short attention span and he could see himself ending up on dog duties as she moved on to something else. He also hadn't realised that her low boredom threshold would apply to him and their marriage. Charles now hated the interior of the house, it was a cold and inhospitable tribute to a woman who'd pissed off, but he adored Parsnip, after all he was his sole company most evenings and weekends.

She'd upped and left out of the blue, with absolutely no warning of what was to come, or none that he'd seen, saying that she felt 'suffocated' and 'needed some space'. At first she'd been adamant that there was no-one else, that she wasn't having an affair or anything, but that she was going to stay in her best friend's spare room for a bit while she 'sorted her head out'. Initially she'd taken Parsnip with her, but two days later she'd bought him back, saying that he didn't get along with her friend's cats, something that Charles congratulated him on, he hated the pair of Siamese himself. He wasn't sure that was the truth anyway, somehow he couldn't see her scooping dog shit off the pavements in Twickenham as she took Parsnip for a walk, something she'd never done when she lived at home.

A couple of weeks ago he'd found out, during a chance meeting with one of her friends who thought he knew all about it, that she'd been lying to him and that she'd moved onto a bloke she'd met at the gym, something she now maintained was karma and that they couldn't help themselves. She wasn't living with him, well not as far as he knew anyway, but he wasn't sure that that wasn't just a matter of time, but he still hadn't told anyone that she'd left or why, not even his parents, it felt like such a failure. He was still expecting her to get bored with Mr Muscles and to walk back in at any moment and he certainly didn't want anyone to treat her any differently when she did.

6.00 and Radio 4 had come on as Charles got out of bed, it was still pitch dark and raining but he decided to take Parsnip and go for a long early morning run in the park, it would set him up for what was likely to be a fairly difficult and very tedious day, a day when he could have done with having had sufficient sleep. They were due to start sorting out a family-run printing business in Shoreditch, somewhere he didn't know and so he would need to use sat nav to find it; he had no intention of going on the train because he liked the feeling of being in his own cave when he'd finished a day with strangers, most of whom hated him. The business would more than likely have to be closed down, although it had a healthy order book it hadn't had any investment in new equipment for years and was making huge losses. In spite of that they were still employing at least twice as many people as they could possibly need, so that he and his team had wondered how many were being kept on as 'family pets', as they called the employees who had no discernible role.

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"Shitshitshitshitshitshit …" Molly stumbled around her room, almost falling over as she tried to tug a brush through her tangled curls at the same time as trying to find something to wear that hadn't spent weeks in a crumpled heap on the floor of her wardrobe. She was sure she'd set the alarm last night, but she hadn't heard it go off, making her look with deep suspicion at the bloke currently lying in her bed watching her. She was now seriously late.

"Come back to bed" He obviously thought he was irresistible as he gestured towards his erection as Molly glared at him, she couldn't believe that she'd brought him home from the pub again last night, she'd sworn to herself that it would never, ever happen again after the last time she'd woken up with him sharing her bed. She hadn't meant to go to the pub at all yesterday, she'd been intending to sort out a decent outfit for today, to iron things that needed ironing and to check that she had decent tights and that her shoes were polished; she'd been going to wash her hair and use the gallon of conditioner that it needed before she could blow it dry into any sort of sleek style, together with half a bottle of frizz-ease, and she'd ended up doing none of it. Instead she'd allowed the claustrophobic loneliness of the four walls of her small, tatty flat to send her to the pub for a half a lager and some company then hadn't come home until the small hours after a lock-in at the pub and she hadn't been alone, she'd bought Aiden back with her.

"Get up and fuck off out of it" She sniffed dubiously at the only pair of tights without ladders or holes that she could find, and then decided that they stank as though she'd found them in the bottom of the laundry bin, which she had. "You ain't staying here and some of us gotta go to work for a living."

"Throw a sickie"

For a second Molly was tempted, not that it would mean a return to bed with him, that was definitely never happening again, but then she remembered what Eddie had said to them all yesterday about how anyone who went off sick today was volunteering to be top of the redundancy list, and not only that, she'd thrown a sickie two weeks ago. She might have taken the dead relative option, but she'd killed off most of her fictional family and drew the line at tempting fate by using someone who really existed. Apart from that she needed this job, from the day she had flounced out of her east Ham home she'd been fiercely independent, she hadn't asked anyone for anything, and even if she was poor and very lonely, she wasn't going to start now.

No, she decided the tights really wouldn't do, she'd have to wear jeans, so she tipped out the laundry basket again and sorted out the least grubby and smelly pair to wriggle into; she knew she'd really have to visit the Launderette soon, something else she'd meant to do yesterday evening, otherwise she'd be going to work naked.

"No, just bleeding well get dressed and sod off, Aiden, otherwise you can go like you are and I'll chuck your clothes out after you"

He started to get dressed, muttering under his breath about cups of tea and toast, mutterings that Molly ignored, she was terrifyingly late now without doing the breakfast bit of Bed and Breakfast for an arsehole she never wanted to see again. She hadn't even got time to make herself something and would have to spend money she could ill afford on getting something on the way into work, and then hope that she had enough money left to get something to eat by the time payday came round at the end of the month, that is if she still had a job to go by then. She pulled on her grubby trainers, then changed her mind and put on a pair of open sandals, and a crumpled white top and hoped that her body heat would make the worst of the creases drop out by the time she'd run for the bus and then run the last few hundred yards to the old building that housed the printing works where she'd been happily employed for the last two years. She knew she wasn't the best employee they had, but Eddie, the elderly owner of the company, was fond of her and had told her that he kept her on because she was pretty and she made him laugh. Molly couldn't see that this 'hatchet man' from their new Head Office was going to be desperately impressed with that as a reference.

It was very obviously late when she got to the bus stop, all the schoolkids had vanished, some of them had maybe even gone to school, and the queue of people rushing to get to work had been replaced by pensioners with shopping bags and mums with pushchairs. Fuck, fuck, fuck, the sandals had been a mistake as she'd had to keep stopping to put them back on and had finally taken them off and run in bare feet and she was now almost in tears as she struggled to get her hair to stay put in the messy topknot she was attempting before she'd realised that she'd forgotten to bring her brush. She was hot and sweaty and breathless and her hair was already falling down by the time she finally got there only to find the building ominously quiet, the only person about was the old boy who did the commissionaire bit and he was sitting at the reception desk reading 'The Sun'.

"Yer missed it" She thought for a minute that he meant that they'd closed the place down already and told everyone to piss off.

"What?"

"They're all in there listening to some bloke from Head Office" he pointed to the canteen, which was the biggest room in the building "Been there nearly an hour they have" He thought for a moment and then sucked his teeth "You're bleeding late ain't you?"

"Yeah, alarm didn't go off"

She didn't know why she was explaining to him, it was none of his business, then wondered disconsolately what the hell to do next. She couldn't just bowl in there as bold as brass and make an excuse, she didn't have one and anyway she didn't have that much neck, and she couldn't just turn round and go home, the old boy was bound to tell Eddie she'd been there, so she went to her own bit of the cluttered and very untidy main office and put the kettle on, at least she could have a cup of tea before she went to the Ladies and tidied herself up a bit. If she was going to get fired then pride dictated that she might as well try and look the best she could, even though it wouldn't be that great given the raw material.

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A/N: Two completely different backgrounds, so what could they possibly have in common …