Author's Note: Sorry for the shorter chapter. But there's less reflection and more active continuum.

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Colin was done with the whole lot of them. The summer was gone and he was determined not to let it drag him down with it. He had Suzette, and he hadn't really sold out. Not really. Not where it counted.

He didn't have the time for moping and whinging- or for rehashing old times- there were going to be a lot of changes in his life. He was sure about that.

The first thing to do, he told Suzette, was to get a job. Not the 'dirty pictures' variety, either, but a proper job. He went to the office of a nice old bloke he had met on a shoot.

"Anytime, son, anytime," Jim had said, "You just knock on me door and I'll be glad to have ye."

It wasn't so easy, Colin found.

Most people wouldn't see him. Secretaries asked him to make an appointment and then said there was nothing for a few weeks at least and would he like to come back next month? Colin said no, at first. Why stay where no one wanted him? And then a week passed and his list was growing shorter. He made advance bookings. He paid repeat visits. He made telephone calls that he couldn't really afford. And then he went to the snooty secretaries and asked for anything they could get him at all. Anytime. Anywhere. Even five minutes.

Jim wouldn't answer his messages and Jim was never in his offices. His secretary was a nervous college graduate who stammered horribly on the phone and took his frustrations out on Colin.

July turned to August turned to September. The money turned to food and rent and basic necessities. The bike had to be sold.

Colin didn't have the heart to sell it. It needed cleaning, it needed petrol and it was too expensive. But it was his! He looked at it and it reminded him of the good bits about money- he could buy things!

But rent was pending and Suzette was getting frantic. He found her crying over a tear in a dress when he came home one evening. She gasped and whipped around when he opened the door and he caught her, with her eyes wide as the tears froze on her cheeks. Her fingers clenched on the dress in her hands. The sight of those tears sent him straight back into the streets.

Didn't she know, he wondered bitterly, that everything was for her? He left his flat early every morning to beg for whatever he could get or wait in outer offices all day. He hadn't taken a picture in days because he went straight back to his Suzette at the end of the day, worried that she didn't have what it took to make her happy.

All of that, and she cried over a bloody torn dress?

Colin was furious. And frustrated. He walked until his head spun and then he went to the nearest pub. Blank faces that glared at his clothes and his shoes and his hair. His kind wasn't welcome. But his money was just the same as everyone else's, and the bartender didn't throw him out. So Colin drank. And drank. And when it was all over he drank some more.

Cool found him there a couple of hours later, hardly able to sit straight let alone think. But Colin could talk. And man, did he talk! Cool hadn't ever heard the cocky young teenager talk like that. Colin was an aggressive drunk and he struck out viciously against the world for trying to make sure he couldn't make good.

Cool considered leaving him on the streets but Dorothea and Suzette were friends. His girl wouldn't stand for such things. So he dragged Colin's ranting self back to Napoly.

"We need to talk," he growled the next morning.

Colin grunted and looked as though he were dying by inches.

"Hey!" Cool grabbed his arm and shook hard. "You listening to me?"

"Yeah, yeah." Colin opened one eye and lurched away with a muffled groan. "Just don' shout."

"I ain't shouting," Cool said flatly, "You just drank too much."

Suzette was out, a fact Colin could only be thankful for. The torn dress was mended and flung haphazardly on a chair and Colin felt a pain heavier than the hangover strike his already aching head.

"All that stuff you said," Cool began, "Any of it true?"

"What stuff?"

"About the big fight, Colin. And your boss."

Colin came just a little more awake. "Partners? What'd I say abou' 'him?"

"You said he paid those thugs to kick us out. It true? Cause if it is, I have some revenge I need to be getting."

Cool looked so terribly cruel for just a moment that Colin blinked in shock and had to force himself not to jar his head by leaning away. "I thought he did," he said carefully, "I don't know."

"You don't know? Or you won't tell?"

Colin sighed and got the ice, plying it to his forehead to get some time to think. A razor snapped open and landed on the bed beside his knee.

"I almost had my throat cut with that," Cool snarled, "So you tell me who's responsible."

"You threatening me, Cool?"

"I'm telling you. I want that name."

"Yeah." Colin put the ice down on his lap and looked the other man square in the eye. His heart was going a hundred miles an hour but he had only one chance before Cool exploded at him. "What are you going to do, eh? It won't make a difference, mate."

"I want to know why."

"For the money. Money makes everything happen."

Cool gave him a weird look and left him alone, obviously not wanting to sit and talk about nothing like they used to. Different worlds, now. Different people. Colin wondered when he had gotten so cynical. He's have joked at one time. Now he didn't find it so laughable.

A week later he camped outside Jim's office and shivered in the light rain until the man left the building. Colin followed him, shouted his name in case he got away.

Jim turned around to wait for him. But that jovial face with its three chins looked surprised, discomfited and awkwardly cheerful. Colin's hopes shrank.

Jim took him for a drink and Colin followed his advice and had a brandy. It burned the cold right out of his blood!

"It's not a good time, Colin," Jim said somewhere along the way, "Business is good, but we're full up. Got nothing for you."

Colin managed to get out a question he'd been thinking about for quite some time- "He told you to, didn't he?"

"Who?"

"Vendice Partners."

"Mr. Partners?" Jim dismissed such a thought right away. "It's got nothing to do with him. There's just no place for you."

No place for him. He'd spent a summer with more work than he could handle, all given to him by the indulgent hand of his Boss. And now that he tried to do things on his own, there was nothing at all for someone of his talents? He'd been on National Television, for God's sake! Didn't it mean anything?

Colin went home with his insides on fire and his skin freezing. Suzette put him to bed and he went to sleep straight away. Yet he woke up briefly to hear her crying softly in the dark and then he went back to sleep.

Cool got him a job at Mario's, working far too long for far too little. But it was work and it paid enough. The rent could go out on time. September turned into October which began to drag to an end.

Things might have continued in such a sorry pattern for a long time if Napoly hadn't been casually startled by the appearance in its streets of a fine, big, American car. It had a driver in the front and a single man in the back. The single man drummed his fingers on his knee, lost himself in various trains of thought and absorbed every last drop of humanity that was available to him through the car windows.

Colin didn't look up from the boxes he was unloading until Mario yelled at him to see to the customer. And then he only straightened with three cans in his hand and said, "What'll it be?"

Vendice was very intrigued at this change in circumstance. When Jim Plant told him about Colin, he'd dismissed the nagging suspicion as smoke and mirrors. But the boy really was down on his luck. Reduced to working in a grubby shop? Those hands so sensitive to the exuberance of photography?

"A moment of your time," he said mockingly.

Colin dropped the last can, shot his head up, got a crick in the neck and said, "Bloody hell" before he could think.

Mario trundled out and yelled something in Italian for the sacrilege to his can.

Vendice flicked the man a five pound note and Mario vanished very fast.

"What do you want?" Colin snapped, bending to pick the can off the floor.

"I heard something the other day; I got curious." Typical blunt jerking speech. Cool blue eyes took in the store. "Why here?"

"I work here. Get out."

"Never be rude to a customer," Partners warned, "Not if you want his money."

"I don't want your bleeding money!"

"A pity."

Just the way he said it made Colin come to a reluctant halt. It had been a long morning and he had a few more hours to go. He was tired, he was bored and he really just didn't care any more.

Vendice moved in for the kill, both physically and metaphorically- "I can offer you something," he suggested, "A small something, no great salary. But the possibilities are boundless, extensive, endless. Are you interested?"

"Selling dreams, you mean? Mass motivation? I don't do that now."

Colin always feared whatever that reassuring innocence was a portent for.

"No, this is different. This time I want you to capture the dreams." Vendice snatched up a bar of chocolate. "Peel off the wrapper. Expose it. Show it for what it really is." He tossed the torn paper to the floor in a nonchalant dismissal. "Interested?" he asked again.

Colin gave him a long, steady look and then turned his back. "You're paying for the chocolate," he said neutrally, "Leave the money on the counter."

Mario handed him a card an hour later. "Keep-a the private business at home, eh?"

The card had a phone number and a name. Colin slipped it into his pocket only because he was too busy to tear it up and burn it.