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“Bit weird…” Ellie says to the stiff figure in the bed next to her, only to receive zero acknowledgement he’s even listening, let alone a reply.
She can’t decide if the silence is uncomfortable or not, but she still feels the overwhelming urge to fill it. Most of her time with Hardy is spent with him quietly brooding to the side of her, but lying next to him in both of their various states of undress makes the air feel thick with tension that requires her signature babbling to break.
“You never answered me. Did you ever have sex with Claire Ripley?”
Immediately he comes alive next to her, rolling over with a deep sigh that seems to come right from the soul, and she can’t help rolling her eyes. She imagines he can sense it even though he can’t see her, her exasperation with his attitude beyond predictable by now.
Still, he doesn’t answer her, and she finds his silence suspicious. He’s usually quick to tell her to shut up, and omissions aside, he never lies to her. She’s as good as confirmed it as true before he lets out another sigh, and finally answers her.
“No.” he breathes out, like it takes all his strength. “Almost, but no.”
Ellie is more taken aback by his honesty than his answer. He may never lie to her, but he also never offers up information about himself without being thoroughly grilled by her first. After what he’s already told her today, that harrowing, horrible story about the river, she didn’t know he had much left in him he’d be willing to give.
His confession has shocked her though, the idea of Hardy even having a sex drive somewhat surprising. Given his general difficulty with human interaction and struggle with social situations she finds it hard to imagine a scenario where he could have had sex with Claire. Rather than quell her curiosity however, his ambiguous answer is just petrol on the patient.
“What do you mean ‘almost’?” she asks incredulously, turning onto her side to speak into the back of his head. He takes less time to respond than before, but he resolutely does not turn around.
“I think we both know that Claire can be very…persuasive.” he says, and the hesitation makes it clear that he really means manipulative, to which they can both agree. “But I came to my senses in the end.”
Ellie doesn’t know what to say to that. At least, she doesn’t know what to say that wouldn’t be incredibly out of turn. She rolls onto her back in lieu of a reply, and the silence is definitely uncomfortable this time. Beside her, Hardy copies her movement, but still refuses to look at her. He seems to sense that she’s holding back, in that weird way of his where he’s strangely in-tune with her; what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, what she needs. It scares her a little that he can see straight through her.
“Just say whatever it is you want to say, Millahr.”
“Were you really going to cheat on your wife?” she blurts out, and cringes at herself for her total lack of tact. She’s been spending too much time with him, she thinks, falling into his habit of a total disregard for social niceties. He lets out a laugh completely devoid of any humour, and she can’t help but tense at the sound.
“She cheated on me first.” He scoffs, and she feels her blood turn cold.
“Oh.” Is all that comes out, more than a little thrown by the admission. She has absolutely no idea how to respond to that. Should she try to comfort him? Tell him she’s sorry? Ask for more details? She is desperate for more information, but he has opened up to her so much more than she expected, and she’s reluctant to risk him shutting down again. He must be feeling braver under the guise of darkness.
Suddenly she remembers the harsh words she’d thrown at him only a few days ago, and feelings of guilt buried in a shallow grave rise back to the surface.
"Stalk me and insult me and you wonder why you’re divorced.”
She had been angry, and rightfully so, but the words had intended to hurt. She wonders now just how much they had.
Hardy hasn’t tried to breach the silence, and it feels like a third person in the bed.
“When?” is all she can eventually come up with. It feels lacklustre even to her own ears, but it’s as much as she dares to push him. She doesn’t know how much it would take to spook him.
“In the middle of the Sandbrook case.” Hardy says, absently rubbing his chest. Her eyes follow the movement, unsure if he’s in pain or if it’s just an old habit and she’s too afraid to ask which it is, too afraid of what she suspects the answer will be. “She’s the reason the whole thing went to hell.”
Ellie is unsure what her next line is. She’s getting the distinct impression that Hardy actually wants to talk about this, but won’t let the secrets spill past his lips of his own volition. Even being something of a kvetch himself, he’s not like her; always needing to talk in fear of it making a home inside her if she doesn’t. She finds herself constantly at her breaking point, always closer to tears than not, the taut wire of her patience always straining with the need to rant and rave and vent all her frustrations. All of which Hardy endures as a strong presence by her side. A presence who, for a man that does a lot of shouting, still actually says very little. It can’t be healthy, the way he keeps everything bottled up. Everything stays in a box in a locked room in a dark house at the dark end of the street. She wonders, not for the first time, if letting everything weigh on his heart is what broke it in the first place.
For once, she seems to know what Hardy needs too.
Prompting.
“What did she do?” she asks, turning back onto her side to face him. She’s even more shocked when he rolls over to mirror her, looking at her for the first time since they climbed into bed, but she tries to keep her face schooled in an expression of innocuous curiosity in fear of scaring him away.
She can just make out his features in the few streams of moonlight that dared pierce through the slit in the curtain, and the thin strips bathe the dips and planes of his face in ghostly grey hues. He looks so weary, so tired, his eyes sunken and the skin beneath a pallet of sallow bruises. She feels a painful sting lance through her chest, watching with a terrible tenderness for him threatening to break her heart.
“Do you know about the pendant?” he begins slowly, an air to his words that immediately sets her on edge.
“Vaguely, yeah. Evidence for the case that went missing, wasn’t it?” she hedges, despite knowing it for a fact. She doesn’t want him to know she’d obsessively searched for everything she could find on the Sandbrook case after reading the basics in the file, doesn’t want him to know that she’s seen everything people were saying about him for failing to solve it. The cruelty of others shouldn’t be a shock to her anymore, not after what she’s seen in her line of work, but the vitriol of the press towards him had left her feeling vaguely ill.
“She’s the one who lost it.” he says, once again raising a hand to rub at his chest, circular motions that she thinks must be his ingrained attempt at self-comfort. “The car got broken into after she pulled over at a hotel to shag another officer.”
It’s his tone more than the details that does her in, she thinks. No anger, no defeat, no inflection in his voice, as apathetic as a broken toy. It feels scripted somehow, cold and disconnected, a word repeated to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Ellie feels the dragon of fury unfurl its wings in her chest, fire arcing through her like water off a cliff. She may just be an ersatz therapist for Hardy in this moment, but she can’t stand seeing him this way. Hardy is coiled rage and low patience, he is rough Scottish brogue and steel in the face of a suspect and he never backs down from her in a fight. She cannot connect that man to the Hardy in this bed, who looks so soft and small and broken, whose voice has no fight left in it.
She is furious with him.
"Why did you tell them you were the one who lost it then?” bursts out before she can stop it, and she realises her mistake when she sees his eyes narrow, his expression morphing into one of suspicion.
“How do you know about that?” he asks in a low voice, and Ellie thinks she can sense some of his signature rage bubbling beneath the surface. She doesn’t know if that should make her anxious or if she should just be relieved that he still seems to be alive somewhere inside himself.
“Saw it in the Broadchurch Echo.” She admits after a moment of loaded silence, and she sees him deflate a little.
“So you already know why I did it, then.” He tells her tersely, and she can’t help but scoff in his face.
“You did not let her ruin your life just because it happened on your watch, Hardy. That’s ridiculous and you know it.”
“Didn’t seem so ridiculous after finding a dead girl in a river.” He spits, and she is so stunned by the venom dripping from the words that she freezes, staring at him with what she’s assuming is an appropriately shocked expression. He softens slightly, remorse clear in his eyes and the minute furrow of his brow, and she feels herself thaw and come back to life as she tries to make sense of his words.
“So it was punishment then? For what happened to Pippa?”
As far as prompting goes it’s about as subtle as a gunshot in a crowded room, but this whole situation is a split lip she can’t help but irritate further, and at some point during this conversation she’d decided that she actually needs to get through to him.
And with Hardy looking at her like she’s slapped him, she knows her supposition is correct.
“It’s more than that.” He says in a raw voice, his tone sounding like he’s trying to be harsh and not quite managing it.
“Then what else is it?” she asks gently, hoping she’s not making him feel like he’s being interrogated, despite the depths of her curiosity.
“My daughter. She didn’t need to know the truth about her mother.” He says eventually, and the apathy is back in his voice. This, too, feels rehearsed. She can picture it so clearly; the nights spent alone repeating it over and over, trying to convince himself of its truth, trying to make everything he sacrificed feel worth it. It startles her how easy the image is to conjure up, and the aching cavity in her chest hollows further.
“And what about her father?” she asks with trepidation, knowing this is dangerous territory. It has always bothered Ellie how little he seems to think his life is worth. He is so disposable in his own eyes, a perpetual third wheel to the world, and she refuses to cater to his poor perception of himself the same way she refuses to stroke his ego.
“She needed her mum more than she needed me.”
“She still needed you though. Kids need their dad.” There’s a chance, she acknowledges, that she’s projecting her own feelings about this situation onto him. With Tom and Fred as good as fatherless now, it’s hard for her to separate herself from the emotions that threaten to overwhelm her on the subject. She’s seen what happens to kids who lose their father, the fallout evident in the way Tom won’t talk to her, in the way Fred cries for the comfort of someone he no longer knows and will never really remember. She can’t help but think Hardy’s daughter was probably hurting in the same way at his sudden betrayal and subsequent departure.
“It wasn’t like that Millahr.” He grits out, having caught on to her train of thought about her own fatherless children.
“Yes, I know that Hardy.” She grits back. And she does know that. She knows he hadn’t wanted to leave the same way she knows Joe had to go, but the knowledge of the children left to deal with the aftermath still hurts. It pains her in new ways she didn’t know she had left in her; having thought she’d already hit every combination of agony possible for one lifetime. “But she still needs you now.”
“Well I’m here, aren’t I?” he says with such conviction, his eyes painfully earnest, and for some reason it sends anger flaring though her system.
“God knows for how much longer, with your condition-”
“It’s not a condition-“
“We are not having this argument again,” She snaps, “and that’s not the point Hardy. What’s going to happen the next time you collapse and there’s no one around to help you? What happens if your heart gives out in the middle of this and it still never gets solved?”
She’s barely restraining herself from grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, to try make him understand the weight of his life, to understand how much he needs to not let himself die right now, how much she can’t afford to lose anybody else, even if (or especially if) it’s him.
“Then you’ll solve it. God knows you can do this without me.” He replies easily, as if it’s a simple truth, and she feels all the more enraged by his indifference towards the whole ordeal.
“What on earth makes you think I’d be able to do that?!” she exclaims, her voice loud enough that she feels the air of intimacy they have whispered their way into fracture slightly, and she can’t help but cringe at herself.
“You’re perfectly capable Millahr, you’d figure it out.” He mercifully keeps his volume low, and she can’t help noticing his accent thicken around her name. She tries not to let it distract her.
“That’s not the point!” she whisper-shouts, trying not to breach the barrier of quiet again. “What happens if you don’t make it, what am I supposed to do?”
“Thought getting me out of the way would be doing you a favour?” He breathes out in a self-deprecating laugh, and Ellie has never found anything less funny in her life.
“Don’t say things like that.” She tells him with steel, and his face twists into an apologetic frown.
“Sorry.” He mumbles, and she can't help but immediately forgive him.
Silence drags on after that, and she wonders if that’s as much as is going to be said on the matter. She’s torn, feeling bad for having shut him down, but she refuses to let him talk about himself like he’s a burden. She may find him infuriating, he may be a giant pain in her arse, but she still needs him. She’d tell him as such, but that’s not how it works. They aren’t supposed to be nice to each other. He’s Hardy and she’s Millahr and they need each other, but they aren’t nice to each other.
She resigns herself to the fact that they’re done talking for the night, and goes to roll over before he shifts even further towards her, letting out a slow, controlled breath, and she automatically braces herself for whatever he’s about to say to her. With only a few centimetres of space between them, she can’t tell if she can feel his breath on her face or if she’s only imagining it.
“I’ve booked the surgery, for the pacemaker.”
That stops her short.
“Oh.” She says, surprise colouring her tone. “When for?”
“In about a week.”
“A week?!” she exclaims, unsure if what she’s feeling is anger or fear or a hearty combination of both. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?!”
“I wasn’t going to tell you at all.” He says defiantly, and it’s definitely anger that’s winning, she decides.
“Why the hell not?”
He rolls his eyes at her, and it takes every iota of patience she has for her to resist smacking him across the head. “You’d only come and sit with me.”
Despite her best efforts, she can’t help but be offended by that. “What, and me being there would be so awful would it?” The hurt in her voice is so obvious even Hardy can’t miss it, and his eyes pinch in a mirror of sympathy that makes her feel like he’s peeled back her skin to take a look inside.
“I might die, Millahr.” He says gently, and she feels a fist clamp around her heart and twist. “You don’t need to see that.”
“You might die anyway,” She reminds him, just as gentle, for her own sake as well as his, “and I might end up being there to see that.”
Guilt takes over his features as they both remember the incident at the boat yard. “I know.”
They continue to stare at each other, seemingly only a hairs breadth apart, and she is suddenly incredibly grateful for the blanket of night laid over them, otherwise she assumes this would be incredibly awkward. She has no desire to look away, and she grows more and more surprised the longer her continues to hold her gaze, refusing to shy away from her.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she says after a while, when the sound of their breathing isn’t enough to fill the space between them in the bed anymore, “with what happened to Pippa.”
A facsimile of a smile crosses his face, one that’s soft and sad, and she wonders if she will ever stop hurting for him. “It’s my fault we didn’t get justice for her.”
“You almost died trying.”
“Maybe almost wasn’t enough.” He sighs, with no attempt at humour this time. She could just about burst into tears.
“Don’t say things like that.” She repeats, without the anger, but the distress is clear in her face.
He looks sufficiently chastised, but he doesn’t say sorry this time.
“That used to be what I wanted, but now I’m not so sure.”
He sounds so brittle, and she doesn’t know what to do. He’s revealing himself to be far too human than she thinks she can cope with. The idea of Hardy wanting to die isn’t surprising, but the knowledge of it still knocks the wind right out her chest.
“I don’t want to die this time, Ellie.” He says in a whisper, as if afraid the universe might hear.
The use of her name sends ice through her veins, the reminder of the interrogation room and ‘don’t call me Ellie’ and ‘it was Joe’ suddenly fresh in her mind. She squeezes her eyes shut, warring with the familiar burning sensation, repressing tears that she can’t tell if are for herself or for him. When she opens them again, it’s to see him gazing at her without reservation, eyes bright and clear and practically melting with heartbreak. Again, it takes her back to that room, his hand on her shoulder as she retched on the floor, and she thinks she’s never needed him more than she had in that moment; him gripping onto her hard enough to remind her that she hadn’t shattered into a million jagged pieces. To keep her from floating away.
The way he says her name is like confessing it, soft benedictions falling from softer lips, and she doesn’t know what else to do but reach out into the expanse of linen between them, the barest gap between the bedsheets that feels like crossing an ocean. He meets her in the middle, his own hand outstretched and inviting, and somehow, she knows he needs this as much as she does.
She looks into his face, tears still threating to fall from her eyes like unwelcome guests loitering long after the party is over. But she feels confidence blossom through her at the connect of their hands and the static that she knows runs through them both at the touch. She moves molasses slow, her hand drifting over his arm, climbing its way towards his chest. She lays her palm there, feeling the thunder of his pulse beat in a rough staccato under her fingertips, reassuring her of the life that lay beneath. Hardy seems to have stopped breathing however, unsure what to make of her movements but reluctant to disrupt them. His eyes meet hers again, and she braces herself again for what she’s about to ask.
“Alec?” she exhales, not missing the way his eyebrows shoot into his hairline at the use of his first name.
“Yes, Ellie?” he replies, saying her name like he’s tasting it, trying to savour the way it feels in his mouth because they both know that this is only acceptable for tonight, that they’ll be back to being Hardy and Miller by tomorrow.
“I’ll take that hug now.”
She holds her breath for the rejection she is sure will follow, and is not prepared for the feel of strong arms grabbing her by the shoulders. She moves into him as if on instinct, the action feeling natural despite how far from it this whole situation is. His hands drift smoothly over her back as they wrap around her, pulling her in to slot her head under his chin. She presses her ear to his chest next to her hand, listening to the disjointed rhythm as it beats out an unfamiliar lullaby. She can’t resist pressing a kiss there, feeling the heat of his skin through the fabric of his shirt. The only evidence of his surprise is in his sharp intake of breath, and she’s halfway to regretting it before she feels the caress of his lips on her forehead. She fights the urge to look up at him, afraid of what she might find if she goes digging through his expression. The topography of his face always gives him away, especially when he doesn’t want it to.
Instead, she just snuggles in closer, pressing so far into his space she feels she may just slip inside of him; take the place of one of his ribs and become a permanent part of his body. It’s a weird thought, she realises, but not an entirely unpleasant one.
She feels his chin take its place atop her head once again as he moves a hand to thread through her hair, keeping her ear pressed over his heart, stuttering but still strong. He has clearly noticed what she's doing, and she feels a tender gratitude for him balloon and burst in her throat.
“I don’t want you to die either.” She chokes out, her voice muffled from where her head is nestled. He says nothing in reply, but she feels the vice of his arms wind tighter around her frame, the elegance of his fingers tracing calloused shapes across the plane of her back. It’s the smallest pressure in the contact, but it dances through her bloodstream, touching her from scalp to toes.
“Go to sleep Millahr.” He murmurs, the rough edges of his voice sanded away by solicitude. She can feel her name rumble in his chest.
With the feeling of his lips still echoing on her skin, she closes her eyes, and lets the gentle tide of his heartbeat lull her away and over shore, riding the wave towards morning.