A/N: Penultimate chapter of this, I thought I would finish updating it before moving on so I hope you enjoy it, I would appreciate it if you let me know.

-OG-

"I am so proud of you" He smirked "But I'm not going to say I told you so"

"Don't then, actually I'm pretty proud of me as well"

"But I did, though didn't I? I told you you'd be brilliant and I'm always right" He laughed "You just need to remember that in future"

"Oh sorry hadn't noticed, smartass"

He picked her up and twirled her round, thoroughly enjoying the look of sheer relief and happiness on her face "Have you rung your mum? And you need to tell your Nan, then maybe she can ditch her plans to put a contract out on me"

"I'm sorry, you know, about the way she is, with you I mean" Molly shrugged and gave him a contrite little smile "She don't mean it, she loves you really"

"She's got a bloody funny way of showing it and if that's the case I'd hate to think how she'd be if she really didn't like me"

"Okay, well I think you might probably be able to tell, but she'll love you when she gets to know you better, she's just a bit, you know, suspicious"

"I know and she's just being protective because she loves you, well we all do Staff Nurse Dawes"

"I'll go and ring them, I wanted to tell you first"

Molly was high on a mixture of excitement and relief, she'd had a massive sense of achievement when she'd passed enough exams to start her training, especially bearing in mind her track record at school, and then she'd been even more excited when she'd been accepted on the course, but they were nothing compared to the euphoria she felt at that moment. It was as if she'd been drinking, which she fully intended to do even though she hadn't started yet, she'd just been desperate to get home to Charles so that she could tell him first. She could have phoned him and gone straight to the pub with the others, but she'd wanted to see his face when she told him.

"What now?"

"I'm meeting the rest in the pub, you coming?"

"No, you go off and celebrate with your mates, go and have fun and I'll come and collect you when you're pissed" He grinned "But I didn't actually mean right now, I meant in general, what's next?"

"Next, I see if I can find a job, so I'll have a look in the Nursing Times or on-line or maybe I'll look at doing some more sort of specialised stuff, you know, training to be a midwife or some'ing"

"I thought you had to be a nun to do that" He laughed, enjoying the sight and sound of her happiness "And I definitely don't want you to be one of those"

"What you don't fancy me in of them whatdoyoucall'em, wimples? "

"Only if I'm allowed to take it off, although come to think of it those costumes are quite sexy really, aren't they? All that covered up stuff"

"You been watching too much tele" She slapped him lightly on the backside "Anyhow think I'd better look for a job first, best look for someone stupid enough to employ me"

"Hey, you are brilliant and anyone who employs you will be bloody lucky to get you" He smoothed her hair away from her face then held her head between his hands resting his forehead against hers "Now, go on, get out of here, go and have a good time and ring me when you've had enough and I'll come and get you"

"Okay, okay I'm going, are you sure you don't wanna come with me?"

"Yup I'm sure, so go, go on, go, and that's an order"

"Alright, I'm going, I'm going" She giggled as she pretended to salute him "Bossy sod"

-OG-

Any talk about Molly moving out of the flat had petered away as the weeks had gone on and she would have needed to find somewhere anyway once she stopped working at Frimley Park because the Nurses Home there was for staff and students only, and anyway she was finding the thought of living away from him difficult to, as she put it, get her head round. There was however this huge problem simmering away in the background, a problem she didn't want to confront and that Charles simply maintained wasn't a problem and then hadn't mentioned since. The minute she'd qualified she'd started working shifts for an agency while she looked for a permanent job, doing agency work was satisfyingly well-paid but mainly involved working short notice nights and weekends, often in A&E. Molly hated the feeling of not knowing anyone, of not knowing where anything was kept or any of the individual routines of where she was working, as well as being the agency nurse meant that she nearly always got the shit end of the stick and got to deal with the almost endless stream of aggressive and/or vomiting drunks. If she wanted to carry on as they were, living together in Leatherhead, she had to find a permanent proper job within an easy commuting distance, something that wasn't turning out to be nearly as easy as she'd thought it was going to be. She'd applied to St Peters at Chertsey and had been rocked back on her heels when she hadn't even got as far as having an interview before being rejected, despite the fact that she'd pulled loads of shifts in the A&E there and had thought she'd done quite well.

All those old feelings of being inadequate, of not being good enough had come flooding back so that she hadn't known whether she wanted to cry or to scream and throw things and had, in the end, done both, the disappointment was incredibly intense. Charles had said nothing, had just put his arms round her and stroked her back as she'd howled, and had then managed to resist the temptation to tell her that it wasn't the only job in the world, that there would be hundreds of others and that it was their loss, or any of the other dozen things that she wouldn't want to hear.

"Sorry" She'd got to the sniffing, snotty nosed, gulping stage of her crying fit and had just noticed that she'd soaked the front of his shirt with tears, or at least she hoped it was her tears as she blew her nose on the tissue he gave her.

"No need, you are allowed to be upset" He pulled his shirt away from his chest and looked down ruefully, then smirked at her "You're allowed to soak me as well, that's what I'm here for"

"Really?"

"Nope, but one thing Moll, it might just be a bit of a blessing in disguise, because if it all goes well at my medical and they say I'm fit enough, well, we don't know where they're going to post me, it could be anywhere" He shrugged, he didn't think it had occurred to her and he stupidly hadn't said anything about it before, probably because he was a bit worried that she would take it as a sign that as soon as she found a job she should be looking to move out and find somewhere of her own.

"What, you won't be stopping here?"

"I don't know, there's no bloody guarantee and I've been away a fair old time so it could be anywhere, Yorkshire, Salisbury Plain, stay here, literally it could be anywhere"

"Can't you tell them you wanna stop here? Well, you know Aldershot or somewhere like that?"

"Yup, of course I can tell them but it won't make any difference what I say because it doesn't work like that, this is the fucking army and I have to follow orders, I have to go where they decide to send me"

"Shit, they won't send you back to Afghanistan or somewhere like that will they?"

"No, there's no danger of that, not straight away anyhow"

"Thank fuck for that" She bit her lip "Why can't everything just go right, just for once?"

"It'll be okay, you'll get the job of your dreams wherever we live, it'll be fine, just wait and see and remember ….."

"Yeah I know, you're always bleeding right, smug bugger"

Charles wasn't 100% certain that passing his medical was going to be the foregone conclusion that he was pretending it was going to be when he talked about it to Molly. He still had some residual pain and stiffness in his leg which he wasn't admitting to, mainly when the weather was particularly cold or damp and he still had this annoying tendency to limp when he'd over-exercised in his attempts to improve his general level of fitness. He knew it was a bit stupid but he was adamant that he wanted to get back to the sort of life he'd had before it had all gone to shit, the idea of being shunted off to sit behind a desk filled him with horror. If he was sure of one thing it was that if it came to that he would resign his commission.

-OG-

The day of his medical was the day that Molly got scared as she sat cross legged in the middle of the bed and watched him getting dressed in his brown formal dress uniform and became horribly afraid that everything was about to go the same way that every other relationship she'd ever had, everything was about to go tits up and she didn't know how to stop it or what had started the rot.

"You've lost a bit of weight haven't you?"

"Yes a bit, but then, quite a lot has gone on since I last wore this bloody thing"

"Might gonna have to feed you up a bit" She giggled, worried at the tense expression on his face "Maybe even make you a cake or some'ing"

"Lovely"

"Are you even listening to me?"

"Sorry"

His uniform was decidedly loose, something he hadn't noticed when he'd worn his red mess jacket, so that this jacket felt big on the shoulders and he'd had to do the belt up one notch tighter than usual. The legacy of the gruelling six month deployment in the heat and dust of Afghanistan, of sustaining a life threatening injury with the resultant long stay in a hospital bed had all taken its considerable toll so that he ran his tongue over his teeth then chewed at his bottom lip and contemplated his reflection in the mirror. He hardly looked the picture of a fit and healthy soldier bursting with renewed vigour and enthusiasm for the rigours of army life, to his own eyes he looked pale and a bit thin, slightly hollow eyed and more than a little bit haggard with an anxious expression in his brown eyes.

"Do you want me to come with you, hold your hand?"

"No, it's alright" He turned round to smile at her where she still sat in the middle of the bed watching him get ready "Thanks anyway but that would really convince them, wouldn't it? If I turn up with my own personal medic in tow"

"Well, I won't tell them if you don't" She wanted desperately to get off the bed and give him a reassuring hug, to try and make him feel better, but his ramrod straight stance and miserable, tension filled face warned her off. She simply hadn't realised quite how worried he was about this medical, he had been so sanguine and gung ho about it that she had been completely taken in by his act of all this being a simple formality. Now she wanted to tell him that it really didn't matter, except that she could see that it did, it mattered enormously "I could wait for you outside in the car if you wanted"

"No, I appreciate the offer thanks but I've got no idea how long it will take, it could be hours and I would worry about you sitting out there getting bored or cold or something"

"Give you some'ing else to worry about though wouldn't it, take your mind off everything"

"I'm not worried"

"No course you're not"

The Charles she knew had vanished as the one who was now wearing his face also disappeared through the front door, forgetting to kiss her goodbye so that he returned a couple of minutes later to peck her on her cheek where she still sat in the middle of the bed, wondering what the fuck to do for the rest of the day, she couldn't just mooch about the flat worrying about him.

"Ring me when you get done"

"Okay, and don't look so worried I'm going to be fine" He did his best to infuse some confidence into his voice but was horribly afraid that she would know that he was lying.

"Course you are" She also tried to sound as though she believed what she was saying and actually did a better job of it than he had, so that he smiled and waved before he closed the front door and Molly's shoulders sagged from the effort of keeping the optimistic expression on her face.

-OG-

She had no idea when things had started to fall apart or why she hadn't noticed before that the happy bubble they'd been living in was just that, a bubble filled with loads of laughter and fuelled by a great deal of sex, but all the same a bubble that seemed to have just burst leaving her unsure why or of what to do next. From the first few days of their relationship she'd had no doubts about him, about them, at all. Even when they'd fallen out over him talking about her to Paul, underneath she'd still been convinced that they would last and that it would be nothing like any of the others, especially not like Paul Walker, but if she had learned anything from that fiasco it was how to spot the signs. Looking at him this morning, standing there in his army uniform, he'd looked nothing like the Charles she knew, he'd had his hair cut short, regulation army length she reckoned so that the back of his neck looked white and vulnerable and he was clean shaven, no stubble today. He'd looked upright and remote, every inch the stern-faced officer so that she was now asking herself where his smile, the smile that melted her heart, had gone.

Eventually she got up and got dressed and spent a couple of hours searching on-line for a job, but then didn't actually e-mail out her CV to anyone because none of seemed to matter that much today, her heart simply wasn't in any of it. All she kept thinking about was what he was doing and whether he was okay, whether his leg would start to hurt and let him down, he didn't seem to realise, and she had never told him, that she knew full well that it still hurt him sometimes, she was a nurse for fuck sake, she could tell when someone had pain no matter how hard they worked trying to hide it.

Charles knew it was a close run thing as he sat and answered the medic's questions after his spell on the treadmill and then the very senior little doctor checked and nodded over the strip of results from his ECG and all the other tests that they'd completed. He wasn't worried about any other aspect of his fitness apart from his leg, his stomach wound had healed perfectly and he had no problems with his general health, no breathlessness or unusual fatigue or pain or anything, it was just his bloody leg.

"Well, Captain, you know as well as I do that you haven't achieved anything like a 100% recovery in that leg, but, given your general fitness and the amount of recovery that has already taken place, I am minded to pass you as fit, with the proviso however that you have to accept that pain is your body's way of telling you to stop whatever it is you're doing so that you can continue to recover and that you report any new problems immediately, okay?"

"Thank you Sir"

"Okay, well I'll be sending my report off to your CO so …. Welcome back Captain" He nodded then held up one hand "Oh and Captain?"

"Yes Sir?"

"Don't let me down"

Charles saluted and couldn't keep the broad grin off his face, he was light headed with relief as he made his way to the car park, got out his phone to call Molly, then checked the time on his watch. She wasn't expecting to hear from him at any specific time because he'd had no idea how long all this would take and now he just wanted to see her face when he told her so that they could start to celebrate that the huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Of course making their plans would have to wait for a bit, there was still the matter of where he was going to be posted, and for that he just had to wait for the meeting with his CO when he would be told what was going to happen …... and where and when.

-OG-

The sound of his key in the lock came as a massive relief to Molly as she flew into the hallway, knowing the news was good the instant she caught sight of the euphoric grin on his face. It had been one of the longest days she could ever remember, she'd spent hours pacing backwards and forwards to the window looking up and down the street checking for his car, checking her phone every few minutes to make sure that it was working, that she had plenty of charge and that the signal was okay and resisting the temptation to call him. She'd tried and failed to find something constructive to do to pass the time, which had crept by, had cleaned every inch of the kitchen then done her nails and had tried and failed to find something even remotely interesting on daytime television.

"Why the fuck didn't you ring me?"

"Sorry, I just wanted to get home to tell you" He bit his bottom lip trying to stop the ecstatic smirk from reappearing on his face, knowing that he should have done what he'd promised.

"I can see that everything's okay, but you said you'd call and I been a bit worried"

"Sorry" He put his arms out trying his best to look contrite "Any chance of a hug?"

-OG-