When She Laughs
By Hazelmist
A/N: A very silly, fluffy, crackish, AU after S1 one shot that's been sitting on my hard drive for a year and a half. Everyone else was doing this scene at the time so I had some fun with it and obviously this was well before S2.
Alec's heart betrays him a little over a month past his fortieth birthday, exactly forty days beyond what his doctor predicted. It's the first thing he says to Ellie along with a hundred other reasons why he should be allowed to leave when she shows up at the hospital to prevent him from signing himself out.
"Look, I'm fine," he insists.
"I don't care. You're not leaving," she answers and settles into the chair at his bedside.
"You can't make me stay!" he argues.
"I don't have to," she responds.
He tries to prove her wrong and fails miserably. The IV starts bleeding, the wires get tangled, and the heart monitor screeches at him when he finally manages to remove the last of the damn things. Ellie doesn't even have to press the call button. Two nurses enter the room within seconds, one of them twice the size of him. His legs give out as soon as they touch the floor and Ellie just looks at him as the two nurses muscle him back into the bed.
"Fine. I'll do it," he hisses as they hook him back up to the machine and the IV drip.
After the disaster that landed him in the hospital in the first place, there are a lot of waiver forms he has to sign, and he grumbles that he retired so he didn't have to deal with paperwork anymore. The last one asks for a second signature that leaves them both scratching their heads.
"If you don't have any other family, than we're going to have to call your ex-wife," Ellie tells him as he wracks his brain for an emergency contact.
"No, absolutely not," he says, shaking his head. "She's so infuriating that she'll send me into cardiac arrest before I even get to OR."
"Fine," Ellie sighs, rolling her eyes at his dramatics. "No ex-wife then. Who should I call? Becca, perhaps? From what I hear she did a marvelous job impersonating your ex." The recollection of the last time he was rushed to the hospital with Becca suddenly gives him an idea.
"Why don't you pretend to be my Mum or my aunt or something?" he suggests, warming to the idea. Ellie is insulted and it's only after she hits his arm that he realizes that he just implied that she was old enough to look like she could be his mother or his aunt.
"I meant to say my cousin or my sister, my baby sister," he corrects himself, too late. His brain must be more addled than he originally thought. Bloody hell, maybe he really did need this surgery. "What do you say, sister of mine? I think we could definitely pull off the family resemblance, both got excellent genes, eh?"
Ellie doesn't find his attempts at humor funny. In fact, she's smoldering by the time the nurse returns and he's certain that the only reason why she hasn't hit him again is because of the nurse's presence. It wouldn't do any good if she signed him up for the surgery and then strangled him before it could be performed.
She very nearly stops his heart though when she finally answers the inquisitive Doctor that she's not his sister at all, but his bloody fiancé.
When she sees the effect it has on him, she tells everyone that he's her fiancé. He's less than thrilled by the prospect, especially since his nurse is a stunning blonde that up until this point had been flirting with him. Ellie even bends down and makes a show of kissing him before he's wheeled out and there's isn't anything that he can do about it because by that point he's already drugged. Now he has to survive the surgery just so that he can make her pay for ruining his chances with gorgeous Nurse whatever-her-name-was.
His opportunity comes a day later when he's finally conscious again and slowly recovering. Ellie gets a phone call on her mobile and he just knows that it's that bloke she won't admit that she's actually kind of seeing. He's surprised when she leaves the room and returns with the smartly dressed fellow who looks just as surprised to see him. Obviously, Ellie wasn't exactly clear on why he had to pick her up at the hospital, and he's already fiddling with his mobile anxiously waiting for Ellie to wrap everything up. Alec decides immediately that he doesn't like the look of him. And when Ellie leans down to fuss over him one last time and reassure him that she'll be back to discharge him tomorrow, he gets a very wicked idea.
He throws his arms around and pulls her down to plant one on her, right smack on the mouth. And he's half covered in tubes and wires, and nurse whatever-her-name-was is standing ten feet away, so there's absolutely nothing she can do about it. When he pulls away, he grins at her and very loudly and obnoxiously refers to her as his fiancé for the first time.
Needless to say, he's lucky that she comes back the next day let alone ever again. He blames it on the painkillers and whatever else they pumped into his system, but she's not an idiot. A few days later, she dumps the majority of the painkillers down the toilet and he finds out very early on that recovering with Ellie is not going to be easy.
"He was all wrong for you," he argues when he gets confirmation that they did officially split up. "Tom didn't even like him."
"Tom's never going to like anyone I bring home," she points out.
"That's not true," he says, smirking. "You just brought me home and he's perfectly fine with it."
He thinks that she might kill him then because it's true that he is the only one that won over her stubborn son, just because the one time she blackmailed him into babysitting he let Tom have chocolate ice cream for breakfast. But the only thing that comes out is a very unladylike snort.
When Tom comes home from school, he's stunned to find Alec and his mother giggling in the kitchen like two little kids. He's never seen Alec laugh before, and it's been so long since he heard anyone make his mother laugh like that, that he had forgotten what it sounded like.
His mother looks up and waves him inside, but Alec beckons him over to his chair, making a big show of lowering his voice to a conspiring whisper that she can definitely hear.
"I'll give you a fiver if you tell your Mum you think I'm cool."
Tom thinks that they both might have taken some of whatever was left of Alec's painkillers, but he's alright with it, because when he tells his mother that he thinks Alec's cool, not only is he five quid richer, but he makes his mother laugh again.
A/N: Stupid, I know, but I hope it made you smile! And I swear I wasn't on painkillers when I wrote that, lol.