A/N: Hello! Just a quick thank you, you're the best and also sorry, please forgive me to anyone who read/followed/favourited/reviewed any of my fics recently. Real life got a bit hectic and I've been without internet recently so I'm sorry if I've not said thank you for reviewing or missed a message or anything.

Anyhoo, this is set post-S3 and is unrepentantly shippy. Although it isn't in your face shippy so I guess if you're in Camp Brotp you can still read it and blissfully ignore a couple of paragraphs if you want.

Finally, the title of this comes from the Frank Iero song Stage Four Fear of Trying. The working title was Alec: Age of Ultra-Moody Teenagers, so there's that.

Disclaimer: I am not Chris Chibnall, ITV or anyone remotely interesting like that.

"It's a bit shit, isn't it?"

Hardy winced and tore his eyes away from the sorry looking deckchair he'd been watching teeter on the verge of being blown over in the sea breeze. Next to him, Daisy was observing the same scene with the look of disdain she'd been wearing since arriving in Broadchurch the day before. He'd long since given up on trying to stop her swearing altogether, though he'd successfully got her to agree not to say 'shit' in front of anyone they met regardless of whether it was swearing or not.

It was the kind of compromise that made him wonder if he was getting better at this parenting thing or whether he was failing as miserably as ever. Either way, Daisy was in one piece, sober, not pregnant and occasionally even smiled so he couldn't have been doing too badly.

Between him moving further north and, he suspected, some gentle encouragement from Tess, they'd all come to the agreement that every other weekend Daisy would stay with him. The first weekend had been spent mainly buying things for her new bedroom and her laughing at him arguing with self-assembly furniture instructions. The second, they'd explored his new town centre. Daisy deemed it pretty much the same as Sandbrook, but with a slightly better Topshop.

With the third weekend fast approaching, Hardy had doubted he could milk a slightly better Topshop for much longer and was completely at a loss for what to do to stop his daughter becoming bored of him. He'd honestly thought his days of trying to impress teenage girls were twenty years behind him. He had yet to decide which was worse; that his life had some come back to this or that he was just as shit at convincing teenage girls he was in any way interesting as he had always been.

It was during a phone call with Miller - something that had somehow ended being a weekly ritual for them - that he'd expressed these valid concerns. She'd called him a "whiny streak of piss" and suggested they come down to Broadchurch for the weekend. By the time she'd finished fleshing out the idea with trips to the beach and Daisy getting at least one decent home-cooked meal during her visit, it had felt like less of a suggestion and more of a command.

"You did say you'd visit," Miller had pointed out while he'd been considering it.

"Did I?"

"No, but it's the polite thing to do so I'll just assume you meant to."

Now they were here with a room back at the Traders, sat on a bench, overlooking the beach and he was glad for it. Her confidence and sharp wit were all her mother's, but she'd somehow ended up with his view on the rest of the human race. Namely that they were to be barely tolerated unless proved themselves otherwise worthy of attention.

"We went to Skeggy last term for Travel and Tourism," Daisy explained, fighting to keep her hair out of her face, "and that was shit as well. There were at least some rides there though."

It was odd, but it was almost as if the more glum her surroundings, the more animated Daisy became. Even odder was that, despite still being adamant that he hated the bloody place, Hardy felt slightly offended on behalf of Broadchurch. He decided it was best not to dwell on that.

"Aye, but if there were rides, then you'd be going on them on your own," he reminded her.

"Oh yeah, you're Iron Man now."

"Six Million Dollar Man."

"Yeah, I don't know what that is."

He shook his head dramatically. "The youth of today… Can't even tell the difference between the Six Million Dollar Man and the Iron Giant..."

"You're such an old fogey," laughed Daisy. "What the hell is an Iron Giant?"

"You just called me the Iron Giant!"

"I literally didn't. I said Iron Man."

Hardy frowned. "Who's he when he's at home?"

He knew he'd made some kind of grave error when Daisy's eyes went almost comically wide, rallying up the kind of indignation that only a fifteen year old could over such a thing. "You don't know who Iron Man is?"

"Should I?" Even as he asked the question, Hardy knew he was out of his depth. Coming from anyone else, he really wouldn't care, but Daisy was different. It wasn't about looking cool in front of his daughter. He'd missed so much of her over the last few years that if it was important to her in anyway, he wanted to know. He couldn't care less about current TV shows or pop music, but if Daisy fancied the blond one then he wanted to at least be aware.

"Can't wait to tell Mum you don't know Iron Man," sniggered Daisy, her hand already reaching for the phone in her pocket. It felt like it'd only been in there a few seconds. The thing seemed to beep with notifications for games and social media sites he'd never heard of with an alarming frequency. When he'd asked her who she was texting she'd just rolled her eyes and informed him that nobody texted anymore.

"Ah, come one, don't be like that," he cringed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Your mother is well aware of what a loser I am. There's no need to - to - gossip any more."

Daisy squinted at him, as though sizing up his words. It was hard to try and keep his position of authority while also pleading, but it seemed to work. She put her phone away in any case. It'd be foolish to think that the knowledge that he didn't know this bloody Iron Man would eventually reach Tess, but he could at least Google it before she teased him about it now.

"Fine," she sighed and he gave her a small smile in thanks.

He turned towards to the beach again to see the deck chair had finally lost its fight with the wind and was now on its side.

"Does it hurt?"

"What?" Hardy asked, turning back to Daisy. Her ever present obstinate tone had been replaced with hesitancy.

"The pacemaker thing," she clarified. "Can you, like, feel it working and stuff?"

"Um, yeah, if I think about it," explained Hardy with a frown. "Don't really notice it anymore. At first it was a bit weird though."

"Right."

Hardy watched his daughter, someone he'd come to realise was a wrecking ball of confidence and cynicism, fiddle with the tear in the knee of her jeans and avoid his eye. In that moment he saw the six year old that confided in him about the older girls teasing her at playtime and suddenly she wasn't so strange to him.

"You can ask questions about it, you know," he told her gently. "I don't mind."

Her eyes snapped back to his, as though she hadn't realised she'd let her guard down. "Is there a scar?"

Hardy nodded.

"Where is it?"

He pointed to the left of his chest, to the tiny ridge he knew was hidden there. "I'd show you, but it's a wee bit nippy to start taking my clothes off."

Daisy wrinkled her nose. "Gross."

"Give me your hand a minute," Hardy requested holding his out to her.

In return he received a look so withering it could only have come from Tess' daughter. "Why?"

"Just want to show you something. Oh, come on," he added when she continued to hesitate. "No one you know is going to see you holding your old man's hand here."

With the reassurance that her social standing wouldn't be affected, Daisy gave him her hand. Hardy lifted his left arm and slipped their hands under his coat and suit jacket so they rested just below his armpit.

"Can you feel that bump?"

"Yeah."

"That's it."

Daisy froze, her eyes darting from his to the lump where her hand was. "What?"

"Well, the main part's all in there," Hardy said, letting go of her hand to gesture to his heart. "Think that part's the battery or something."

"Battery?" repeated Daisy. "What if it runs out?"

"It won't for years yet, darling. My doctor looks at it every check up."

Apparently happy that he wasn't about to collapse, Daisy reached out and poked the spot again. "That's so weird. Wait - is there an off switch?"

"I bloody hope not."

Thankfully, she laughed and he dropped his arm over the back of the bench behind her. He saw her notice this, but didn't mention it.

"So it's all safe and that?" Daisy asked, nodding towards his chest.

"Aye," he replied. Sensing she still seemed worried, he added, "although I have to stay away from electric toothbrushes."

"What?"

"Some things can mess about with the electronics so I can't have them close to the pacemaker. One of them is an electric toothbrush."

Daisy tried desperately hard to keep a straight face, but it wasn't long before she was howling. For the first time since they'd started to reconnect, Hardy felt like she was laughing with him rather than at him and it wasn't long before he joined in. The nervous air that had surrounded them only fuelled their amusement and it was a long time before either of them recovered enough to speak.

"So you're like a shit Iron Man who can be killed with a toothbrush?"

He may not have understood what Iron Man was, approved of her language or actually be killed outright by a toothbrush, but none of that seemed important with his daughter smiling at him so Hardy nodded.

A squeal from further down the path made them both turn to see the Miller family, ice creams in hand, fighting the wind to meet them. The noise had clearly come from Fred, who was overjoyed with the blue lump of sugar and ice he had in his hand and around his face.

"Sorry it took so long," Miller said breathlessly. "The little man insists on walking everywhere at the minute."

Fred grinned in agreement.

"Um, there you go," Tom said, handing a ninety nine to Daisy. She muttered her thanks and Hardy spirit was lifted to see that it wasn't just his child who mostly communicated in grunts and complaints.

Miller gave him his ice cream, her eyes skittering away from him as she busied herself with cleaning Fred up now she had a free hand. By the time she'd finished, the poor boy's cheeks were as pink as hers and Hardy shot her a questioning look that she pretended to miss. He wondered what he could have possibly done now, but was distracted by a trickle of melted ice cream running down his hand. By the time he'd licked it off, she was asking Daisy how she was enjoying Broadchurch so far, her smile a little wider than normal as it always was when she was talking to someone she didn't know too well.

"It's nice, I guess," Daisy replied politely. "It must be cool living this close to the sea."

Mentally, Hardy let out a sigh of relief that her summary was different from the one she'd given him.

"You get used to it," Tom shrugged, somehow already down to the cone of his ice cream.

"When you were a baby we could barely keep you away!" teased Miller. She turned to Daisy. "When he was six, he asked for a sandpit. We live five minutes away from that sandpit."

Miller gestured over her shoulder to the beach and Daisy laughed. Although it was a relief to see his daughter and Miller getting along all afternoon, Hardy was a little surprised. Considering how well Daisy had responded to the rest of Broadchurch, he had almost expected her to have a similar first impression of Miller to his. He guessed it had something to do with how it was all but impossible to hate Ellie Miller and her uncanny ability to make friends with anyone.

"Don't listen to them, Tom," Hardy told him bracingly. "Earlier Daisy was saying I was Iron Man."

He tried to imply the whole thing was entirely ridiculous in the hopes that he'd get some clue as to who Daisy was comparing him to. Perhaps he did know and just needed his memory jogged? It couldn't hurt to try and save some face.

"What? Why?" asked Tom with a frown. "Because of your - y'know - thing?"

Deciding to take the risk, Hardy nodded.

Tom shrugged. "Makes sense."

Teenagers, thought Hardy bitterly.

Daisy leant closer to Tom. "He doesn't know who Iron Man is."

Bloody teenagers.

"What?" gasped Tom as Hardy tried to look unaffected. "How can you not know Iron Man?"

With Daisy's smirk and Tom's open-mouthed horror staring at him, Hardy was failing to think of how to defend himself. Why did it even matter? He was in his forties, for fuc-

"Geez, Hardy," giggled Miller. "Even I know who Iron Man is."

"No, you don't," Tom scoffed.

"I do!"

"Who is he, then?"

Under Tom, Daisy and his stares, Miller's confidence wavered. Only Fred was unbothered by the conversation, still interested in his Mr Bubble. She glanced at Hardy as though hoping for an out, but he raised his eyebrow and waited for her answer. It felt mean, but if he wasn't the only one then-

"Tony Stark."

Her reply was given while staring right at him. Her grip on the shoulder strap of her bag told him that she wasn't nearly as certain as she was making out.

That all changed, of course, when Tom and Daisy both started laughing and congratulating her as though she'd done something remotely impressive. He folded his arms, slumped back on the bench and ate his ice cream.

Bloody Miller.

Despite his mood, Hardy still watched as Miller, heartened by the kids' reaction, smiled proudly back at them. It was a smile he imagined was seen a lot more before he met her and never failed to make her look years younger. It made her glow almost, and Hardy often wondered if he was made to look somehow more miserable in comparison.

"He's an Avenger," she explained to him. There was nothing gloating or patronising in her voice.

"Like Joanna Lumley?"

Judging by Tom's confusion and Daisy covering her face with her hands, this Tony Stark had nothing to do with Joanna Lumley.

Barely concealing her laughter, Miller busied herself with the flake in her ice cream.

"You are so old," Daisy said in what could have been a fond tone and Hardy found it didn't really bother him so much.

"How about tonight, after dinner, we watch Iron Man?" Miller suggested to Tom and Daisy. "I'm sure we've got it on video somewhere."

"Blu-ray, Mum."

Hardy side-eyed Miller and she shot him a quelling look but it didn't matter. He wouldn't have made that slip up.

"Sounds great," Daisy replied, sounding genuine.

"We've got the second one as well," enthused Tom.

"We'll see."

Fred started pulling on his mother's coat and waving the stained stick left from his ice lolly around. She bent down to take it from him and clean him up again while Daisy and Tom discussed suits, pepper and fire extinguishers and Hardy wondered what the hell this film was about.

When having a napkin scrubbed against his face became irksome for Fred, he began to shake his head so his curls bounced around. Rather than tell him off, Miller prodded his nose with her cone, leaving a splodge of ice cream on the toddler. Shocked, Fred stopped whinging and stared at his giggling mum who wiped it away almost immediately. Soon the boy was almost giddy with excitement as his face was cleared of sticky residue and the game evolved to include Miller putting ice cream on the tip of her nose so he could wipe it off.

The whole thing made Hardy wish he had a camera. It was the sort of moment they would always want to capture when Daisy was a baby until they had albums filled with pictures of her and one of her parents in various everyday settings that were so fascinating at the time. With Joe gone, Hardy wondered who was playing photographer for Fred's early years and what it would mean to the boy when he was older to see him and his mother so happy during this horrible period of their lives.

A voice in his head that sounded a lot like Daisy reminded him that his phone had a camera, but he doubted it was really his place to start taking pictures.

With his face clean and his mum's ice cream all but gone, Fred was apparently bored of them and was trying to make a break for the beach.

"No, Freddie!" cried Miller pulling him back. Fred waited until she'd looked away from him before trying again.

"Take your eye off him for two minutes and he'll be halfway to France," commented Hardy.

"No chance," said Miller, picking him up. "He's not got a passport."

"I can go with him, Mum," Tom offered. "He'll probably make one sand castle and get bored anyway."

With safety precautions set and Fred's coat securely zipped up to his chin so he resembled a curly haired Michelin Man, the Miller brothers walked down to the beach. Once they'd found a spot and Fred was happily kicking sand up to watch it fly away in the breeze, Daisy surprised Hardy by asking to join them.

"I didn't pack your bucket and spade, darling," he pointed out and she rolled her eyes.

"No, but I haven't been to a beach in years."

"Thought you went to Skegness a few weeks ago?"

"Whatever. Can I?"

"Don't see why not."

"Awesome," Daisy smiled. "I'll look after Fred," she added to Miller.

"You don't have to," she insisted, looking over at her sons. "But if he tries to eat sand please stop him. And that applies to Tom as well."

"Will do."

Without looking back, Daisy was walked away from them. Hardy was baffled. He'd known asking her to help with the washing up turn into a screaming match, but she'd just voluntarily asked to babysit a toddler she'd met a couple of hours ago.

"She's really great with Fred," Miller commented, nibbling on the remains of her cone.

"She's not getting her own for Christmas."

Miller laughed, though Hardy wasn't joking.

They watched as Tom and Daisy tried to coax Fred into building a sand castle despite not having any of the proper equipment. Even with Tom doing most of the work while Daisy sat Fred on her knee to prevent him kicking more sand, it still looked more like a sand pile than any kind of building.

"Nah, but she might be good at childcare or something. Do it at college and all that?"

Hardy didn't reply. He had no idea what Daisy wanted to do when she left school. In fact the mere idea of her leaving school made him panic. She was his little girl and he'd blinked and suddenly someone was suggesting she could look after someone else's.

After all of the progress he thought he'd made since his operation - the regular phone calls, the visits - he thought he knew his daughter once again. Now he realised that there was so much more to know that he hadn't even considered asking about.

"So how exactly am I Iron Man?" he asked.

If Miller was offended by him ignoring her question she hid it well. "He's got this - thing - in his chest," she explained.

"Thing?"

"It's like… a light."

"Sounds handy for bedtime reading. Wish my chest thing had a light."

"At least I know who he is," Miller grumbled.

Without a response, Hardy went back to watching the kids. Daisy was helping Fred pick stones and shells to use as decoration while Tom dug a moat. Even from a distance he could see her smile and hear Fred's laughter. Miller was right; she really had a knack.

"Is it a good thing if she thinks I'm a shit Iron Man?" asked Hardy thoughtfully. He hadn't meant to sound quite as vulnerable as he did so he cleared his throat and busied himself with his ice cream. Unfortunately, what little was left was a bit soggy and only served him as reminder that it wasn't just his relationships that turned to shit if he ignored them long enough.

"I think so," she mused. "He's a goodie. Rich. Famous."

Hardy scoffed. "Sounds exactly like me."

"Well, he's very handsome," argued Miller, biting a chunk of her cone off with a far more satisfying crunch than he'd managed.

"You think I'm handsome?"

He'd meant it as a joke. Well, he thought he'd meant it as a joke. Humour, however, had never been one of his strong points. Somehow he'd bollocksed it up entirely and it must've come off as a sincere question judging by Miller's reaction. Shock quickly became disgust, as her cheeks grew pinker and pinker, and all of it was a bit too overdone to be genuine.

"Maybe if you had a shave," she managed eventually. "And a haircut."

"All right, all right..."

"Ironed your clothes - hey, maybe you're Unironed Man!" she grinned, nudging his shoulder with her own.

He glared out at the sea. "That's not even close to being funny."

"Stop smiling, then."

"Not smiling."

"Yeah, but you're doing that Hardy smile."

"What?" Hardy forgot he was irritated and looked back at her.

"Where you don't smile but you can tell you would be smiling if you were physically capable of it."

She had scrunched her nose up affectionately as she spoke. Even though he'd considered her a friend for a good while now, he didn't always remember that this meant she liked him back. He was so used to teasing being anything but friendly that it still made him defensive.

Either way, something in her tone warmed him inside rather than hurt. Unconsciously, he recalled the last few months of his marriage, where Tess' teasing turned into jibes that were becoming more barbed and his responses grew sharper and whatever he tried to do to fix it only seemed to make things worse. It wasn't until he found out about the affair that he realised he'd lost her long before he'd noticed.

Next to him, he could see Miller trying not to seem too happy at winning this round and found himself fighting a smile as well. It couldn't have been further away from the times with Tess.

Hardy was aware that he wasn't the smartest man in the world, but that he was far from an idiot. It might not be wisdom as such, but he accepted that while there were lots of things he knew, there were plenty of things he never would. For instance, he knew he could have been a better husband, but that he'd never know what finally drove Tess into another man's arms. He knew Joe Miller was currently in Sheffield and showed no signs of moving, but would probably never know the full story of what drove him there.

He knew that if there was one thing he would always know, it was his heart. He knew it was the weakest part of him, the part that would always cause the most pain, both physically and metaphorically. He knew he needed that little bit of metal to keep it steady, just like he needed Daisy to remind him why he had to keep going. A few months ago now, he learnt that there was a small part of it that Miller had somehow forced her way into. It was a part that wanted her safe, wanted her happy, wanted to board up the windows and fix the roof of her once perfect home after he sent a hurricane at it.

He knew he could pretend that that was all there was to it, as long as it was left undisturbed. He didn't know what he'd find if he or anyone else examined it too closely. Or maybe he did and that was why he left it well alone?

"You're doing all right, you know," Miller said softly, nodding at Daisy. "This whole single parenting thing."

"I have no idea what I'm doing."

Miller chuckled and bit off another part of her cone. "None of us do."

"How do you do it?" he asked, shaking his head. "All day, every day. On your own."

Something flashed in her eyes that told him that he was probably being insensitive, but she gave him a tight smile that meant she was used to him speaking without thinking by now.

"I keep telling you - none of us are alone. Not really. Not ever."

Hardy met her gaze steadily until he suspected that she was seeing that part of him that cared a bit more than was probably sensible about her. He looked out over at Daisy, all pretence of apathy abandoned to help Fred write his name in the sand, the orange of Miller's coat lingering in the corner of his eye, and allowed himself to not just hear, but feel her words for the first time.

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