When the Storm Breaks
By Hazelmist
A/N: Holy guacamole it's been a century since I updated, so sorry. Quick reminder THIS IS AN AU THAT IGNORES S2-3 and includes OCs. Joe pleads guilty and is in prison. Vicky Williams is Alec's ex, Aaron Cooper is Vicky's new husband, Keira Williams is Alec's daughter, Iris is his Aunt, Marty Baxter is her nephew and Alec's doctor. Worthington is Ellie's boss and used to work in SB, Molly and Phoebe are the SB victims and Malcom Frost was Alec's prime suspect.
PREVIOUSLY ON WTSB: Months after Joe's sentencing, Alec Hardy returns to Broadchurch to deliver Ellie Richardson her divorce papers, falling for her and her boys in spite of his declining health. Growing closer, they struggle to move on from their tragic pasts, but while Ellie packs up her life in Broadchurch and accepts a new DS position in Edgewood working a case similar to SB, Alec's past in Sandbrook threatens to drag him to his grave. When Alec finds out he's dying, he knows he has to leave Ellie, but not before bringing Tom to see Joe in prison. Ellie struggles to forgive Alec and to accept that he's dying and won't spend his final days with her. They seize a few more precious hours together over the following weeks, while his Aunt Iris tries to keep him alive in Sandbrook, angering his estranged daughter Keira and forcing Iris to choose between them. Eventually, Marty and Iris find a surgeon that'll do the pacemaker surgery and Alec signs off on it although it's unlikely he'll survive.
Alec spends his "last" day with Ellie in Seabrook, promising he'll "watch over" her sons, providing her and Tom with Iris's number if they ever need anything. Ellie in turn promises that she'll solve the SB case, that she won't call him and that she'll look in on his daughter. Ellie quickly realizes that Alec isn't going to Scotland and finds Alec before the surgery. When she can't talk him out of suicide, she leaves him and convinces Vicky that Alec needs to see his daughter immediately. Alec gets his moment before the surgery with Keira, unaware of Ellie's involvement. Later, Keira stumbles out of the waiting room crying. Vicky blames Ellie for her daughter's grief, warning her not to come near them again. Ellie returns to the bench in BC and lashes out in the form of one last voicemail for Alec. In the present, the past is dug up as Keira meets Fred in Broadchurch and Ellie tries to come to terms with what happened while she tries to solve SB for Alec. But is Alec really gone?
P.S. There were a lot of flash-forwards but 32, 35, 39, 40, 41 and 43 bring us up to speed to Ellie's POV in the present, while 27, 39, 42 and 48 hint at what everyone else has been up to. If you have any questions or opinions, feel free to ask or share.
TRIGGER WARNING: Mention of a drug overdose and alcohol withdrawal, possible ghosts and supernatural shenanigans, and an off-screen death of a previously mentioned minor OC.
Chapter 49: When the Storm Breaks: Part One
One year later, Ellie Richardson has moved beyond that bench entrenched within the shadow of Broadchurch's eroding cliffs, building a new life for her and her sons in a town far enough away from the call of Joe Miller's memory. Ellie left Joe's name and the home she shared with him behind. The nightmares about her ex-husband stopped after Tom disowned his father and Fred chose a new one. Alec Hardy should've been a faded memory that paled in comparison to the fifteen years she spent with Joe, but Ellie brought him home one summer night drunk on wine and moonlight. Sometimes she can still see him, hovering over Fred in the nursery as he promised he'd always be there, or forlornly gazing up at her from the bottom of the stairs before he fell. He swore he wouldn't haunt her, but that was before the inevitable fall and the day their lives changed forever.
The man she loves is a ghost she can't bury. There isn't an obituary, or a funeral, or a headstone she can visit as proof that he's gone. She said goodbye to a dying man, she let him go into a surgery knowing he wouldn't walk out, and she held his grieving daughter in his arms when it was over, but it's not enough for her.
On the rare occasions that Worthington or anyone else ask how Hardy's holding up in Scotland, Ellie lies.
It's terrifying that she understands the distraught mother from her first police case - a woman who had been so desperate for her son to be alive that she'd been willing to give up everything to believe in a con man's beautiful lie. Iris calls her several times in the weeks and months following Alec's death, but Ellie can't listen to any of the voicemails. She deletes them and the apologetic odd text, blocking both numbers. Iris makes a single attempt to assuage her guilt in person, bringing Christmas gifts purchased on Alec's behalf. Ellie tells her to piss off and to never come near her or her boys again. Iris disappears, but Alec Hardy won't go away.
She sees him in her dreams, and sometimes she swears he's across the pitch at Tom's match, or reflected in Fred's sparkling eyes as he recounts another adventure he had with Daddy. She never corrects her three-year-old because somehow he's still with him. But no matter how many tears she sheds alone in her bedroom, or how many times she tries to pull an all-nighter working the Sandbrook case, Ellie wakes with only the dimmest recollection of someone being there.
Tonight will be different; tonight she'll face her ghosts and the storm will break.
Opening her eyes, she gazes at the neglected headstone ringed in shattered glass. The wind rustles the leaves of the bordering trees, and the tattered flag honouring Phoebe's granddad flaps like the Union Jack on a sinking ship. DI Hardy had drowned in that case; perhaps he'd replaced that photograph and led her here as a warning not to become another casualty of the futile investigation. It doesn't make the fact that she failed him, Phoebe, Molly, and their bereaved families any less of a burden. Tomorrow they'll take her off Molly and Phoebe's case and it'll become another cold corpse and another sad story buried among the unquiet dead in Sandbrook.
Ellie shines her torch on the last snapshot of two vibrant teenagers before they were murdered. The broken man who had fought for them had lost his heart to that battle. She couldn't save Alec or bring him back, but that hadn't stopped her from promising to solve the case he couldn't finish.
"I'm not giving up. I will solve this," she vows, clutching the photo that Alec had kept in his wallet. "I won't forget you." Blinking back tears, she pockets the photo and touches Phoebe's headstone. "I'm so, so sorry, sweetheart."
Her fingertips come away smelling of Rosemary and whiskey – a potent combination of the pains taken to remember and the poison prescribed to forget. It isn't fair. She wants to scream it into the storm clouds gathering overhead, but this is a place where the dead will always speak louder than the living.
"You were too young," she sniffles, and Phoebe's headstone blurs into a line of stones stretching out into the ocean on one final summer day. "I loved you."
A tear streaks her cheek. The trees echo her groan of sorrow overhead, rocking and swaying in the rising wind. The storm's ready to break. As the first fat raindrop falls, something flickers in the air before her. Ellie squints into the darkness and for a split second there's a pale girl, frowning at something beyond her.
Someone coughs and Ellie's blood freezes in her veins. The girl's gone, but something else tracked her to her grave. The man behind Ellie drops his cigarette at his feet, still burning.
"I knew you'd be here, Cate," he slurs and a cold clammy hand wraps around her wrist.
Beyond the walls of the encroaching darkness, DS Aaron Cooper slams the door of his cruiser and warily approaches DS Richardson's abandoned vehicle. He stoops, shining his torch through the car windows and the locked gates on the other side.
A pale teenage girl peers at him from between the iron bars.
"You're trespassing." He hates working third shift. Half the calls usually lead here, and the cemetery freaks him out. He's not going in there unless someone's screaming bloody murder.
"Go home before I arrest you." DS Aaron Cooper is well over six feet and eighteen stone, but the teenager isn't intimidated by his bulk or his threat.
"I mean it, you and your mates better be out of there in two minutes," he warns her and pulls out his mobile to make a phone call. Normally, he wouldn't bother, but tonight he'd owed his old boss a favour.
"I'm outside the gates." He sighs as a barrage of questions pours in from the other end of the line. He can't see her in the misty fog and pouring rain, but he can feel the girl's creepy blank stare.
"There's nothing except some kids having a smoke, but your Sergeant's car is here… How should I know? It's empty…" His eyes widen. The girl's vanished, but the gate's smoking.
"Hey! HEY!" he yells and starts running along the wrought-iron fence. "Bollocks!" Glass crunches beneath his shoes and he nearly slips in the wet leaves. "You better call the fire department."
Cooper hangs up and swiftly scales the damp stone wall. He lands amongst the headstones, looking around wildly. The girl's gone and there's no sign of a fire. Rain soaks through his coat and trousers, but Cooper can't feel anything other than the overwhelming fear that there's an army of ghosts behind him. A distant flash catches his eye and he races toward it, letting it guide him through the pitch black to his victim.
"I know you're in here!" he shouts. His voice is nearly lost in the clap of thunder and the shrill scream that follows.
He runs right into them. There's a male hunched over with his back to him, but there's a flurry of movement on the ground underneath him.
"You bitch! You're not Cate-"
"Get off me you fucking-"
Cooper rips the bastard off of the girl and throws him into the nearest headstone.
"Are you alright?" he asks, turning to face an older woman than he'd been expecting. Her hair's dripping and she's cradling her shoulder, but there's something oddly familiar about her scowl.
"Don't let him get away!" she screeches, pointing to her attacker.
The staggering male's obviously drunk, but he tries to run before Cooper grabs him again. Cooper's shoes slip in the muddy grass and he lands hard with the young man pinned beneath him. His hoodie reeks of whiskey and stale cigarettes.
"Ugh, they should pay me double for this," he complains, thinking of the grass stains on his suit. Cooper reaches for his handcuffs, but the youth squirms and hits him with a flailing elbow.
"Fuck!" Cooper curses as the miscreant escapes his grasp. He lurches forward on unsteady legs, weaving behind a headstone before scuttling off into the shadows.
"What is wrong with you?" the woman yells as he runs after him. Radioing for backup, he stumbles over a fucking urn in the darkness. Cooper feels his weak ankle rolling out from underneath him and the elusive suspect slipping further and further away.
"You're under arrest!" He scrambles to his feet as the suspect nears the gate. "Fuck. Fuck! Get back here you little shit!"
A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the scene as justice is finally served. The woman comes out of nowhere, wielding a bottle of Jack's like a cricket bat. She hits her attacker's head with a sickening crack. Whimpering, he collapses face first into the mud of a fresh grave.
"Bloody hell." Cooper joins her and together they stand over the moaning drunk on the ground, fighting to catch their breath. "Nicely done…"
"DS Ellie Richardson." She drops the whiskey bottle.
"DS Aaron Cooper, we've met."
Ellie handcuffs the suspect and rolls him over so that they can look into the young man's mud-smeared face and bloodshot eyes.
"Derrick Norseman?" Cooper gapes at the young man. He hasn't seen him since that night last summer when he pulled Keira unconscious and barely breathing off of Norseman's fire escape.
"You know him?" Ellie sounds surprised. "I recognize him from the file as being one of the last people to see the girls alive, but there were thirty other kids at that party and he was too fucked up to be considered a credible witness. He thought I was Phoebe's grieving mother, claimed he unknowingly helped Alec's prime suspect Malcom Frost kill the Sandbrook victims before he realized I was police."
Cooper's still on that fire escape, staring into that same unfocused gaze of someone too high to care about a girl who might die from a drug overdose. Cooper had driven Keira back to Wilson Memorial and had carried her into A&E himself. Vicky had already been there, screaming about how it was Hardy and that bloody woman's fault for bringing Keira in to visit her father. But Keira had pulled through that morning, only to break their hearts over and over again.
"You bastard!" Cooper snarls and kicks Norseman in the ribs. He gets on top of the scrawnier man, grabbing a fistful of his filthy hoodie in one of his big hands. "This is for Keira!" Norseman's nose breaks beneath his knuckles with a satisfying crunch.
"Stop. STOP!" Cooper's vaguely aware of Ellie shouting in the background, but the outside world has receded. He can see nothing but his step-daughter and the bruises lining the inside of her arm that Derrick Norseman helped her put there. Ellie smacks him a few times, but she's no match for the horrific nightmare Cooper's been forced to relive. It isn't until she goes for his ear, pinching the lobe and jerking his head back, that she manages to break through the angry red haze. Cooper comes back to himself with a growl and narrowly misses adding another blossoming bruise to her face.
"Get out of my way," he commands her, standing unsteadily and cracking his knuckles. "I'm doing this for Hardy and his daughter."
"Hardy wouldn't want you to destroy his only chance at solving this case!" Ellie argues, rising to her feet. She barely comes up to his shoulder, and yet Cooper recognizes the stubborn strength and the spark that set a man like Hardy on fire.
"You weren't there," Cooper growls as the nightmarish tide of trips to A&E, the rehabs, the relapses and Keira's deadbeat "mates" like Derrick threatens to overtake him. "You don't know what it was like watching her suffer and watching Vicky and Hardy…" His voice cracks but he blames the moisture in his eyes on the rain.
"Then tell me," Ellie urges him, bringing him back to the storm in the present and the fucking bastard whimpering and bleeding at their feet.
"Cooper," she pleads with him over the rumbling thunder. "Tell me what happened to Keira."
Cooper stares at Ellie and it hits him like the bolt of lightning that throws the ghastly cemetery and the truth into stark relief. Hardy never told her.
"Do you remember the day Hardy got the surgery?" Ellie nods and Cooper swallows hard. "Afterwards, Keira went out with her mates and shot up on heroin. She nearly died." He chokes as the memories threaten to drag him down again.
"That bloody bastard-" He stabs a finger at the piece of shit, lying in the filth where he belongs. "That cock-sucker left her out on the fire escape with some ice shoved down her knickers to sleep it off," he snaps. "If she hadn't called Iris, if I hadn't found her, if Hardy…"
Ellie sways on her feet, clapping a hand to her mouth.
"I don't even know what Keira was doing at the hospital, but she was next of kin and Hardy's surgeon cornered her, and she just…" Cooper trails off as Ellie makes a strangled sound in the back of her throat.
"Oh, my god," she gasps and sinks to her knees. "That's why Iris kept calling me." Ellie breaks off, retching into her hands. "Oh, god, Keira." She gets sick in the broken glass strewn across the grass.
"She's better now," Cooper tells her, but Ellie starts gagging again. He steps back to call for an ambulance and returns to find Ellie in shock.
"I'm so sorry," she keeps apologizing over and over again. "I didn't know."
DS Aaron Cooper might not be Britain's brightest detective, but he puts the pieces together by the time the sirens reach them. Her bruised face is stained with more than just the raindrops.
"Keira got help," he explains as Ellie silently shivers next to him in a drenched coat that isn't hers. "She's out of rehab and a lot better now," he reassures her, and then adds, "You should go see her. They're at Iris' now." He keeps talking about Keira until Ellie stops sniffling beside him.
"They'll never forgive me," Ellie whispers, teeth chattering. Her face is awash in the splashes of red light that accompany the wailing sirens and the arrival of the firemen at the gates. Cooper touches her shoulder as the first torchlight blinds them.
"Let's finish this for Keira."
"And for them," Ellie vows, and together they look over at Phoebe's abandoned grave.
For a moment, he can see the blank-faced teenager from the gates and a younger girl who always reminded Hardy of Keira. Ellie inhales sharply and Cooper would've fainted if they came any closer. He blinks and they're gone, but neither he nor Ellie mention the girls in their reports.
They never see them again, but Norseman isn't so lucky…
One year after they said goodbye, Ellie Richardson returns to the same seaside town that holds her last memories of Alec Hardy. It's pitch black and raining for most of the drive up the coast, but Wilson Memorial's bright windows are a welcoming light at the end of the dark tunnel.
Any hopes she might've fostered on the ride behind the ambulance carrying Norseman are immediately dashed upon entering A&E. The packed waiting room smells like a rotting corpse and sounds like a hellish choir of wailing sick babies. An elderly man coughs up blood onto the floor, and the woman with him starts screeching about the estimated six hour wait time in red. Suddenly she understands why Alec would've rather died in a ditch than in here.
"I've got bad news," Cooper informs her when they finally find each other again in the chaos. His big hand clasps her uninjured shoulder, steering her out into the hallway. "Norseman bit one of the paramedics so they knocked him out."
Ellie can't blame the paramedics, but if Norseman's unconscious then they're not getting their confession anytime soon.
"They want to admit him for 'altered mental state'," he spits, and Ellie can sense their case unravelling before they even have a chance to prove it. It could be hours, maybe even days, before they rule out a stroke or brain injury. By then Norseman could have lawyered up and recanted.
"He was hallucinating in the ambulance, claiming Phoebe was coming to get him." The hair on the back of Ellie's neck prickles as Cooper rakes a trembling hand through his white blonde curls.
"He's probably withdrawing from whatever the hell he's on, definitely suffering from delirium tremens too," Ellie predicts, rubbing her throbbing temple.
"I hate this bloody graveyard shift," Cooper whinges and restlessly twists the shiny new wedding ring on his finger. "It always ends with some kid overdosing or the local drunk in the DTs again."
"Want me to smuggle some whiskey in for him?" Ellie offers darkly. "We could try bribery or an IV…"
"Or maybe you could go upstairs and pull the plug on Malcom Frost," Cooper volleys back, laughing nervously as Ellie's eyes widen. Alec Hardy's prime suspect had been Malcom Frost. If they'd known the identity of the accomplice they probably could've used it as leverage and closed the case years ago.
"Frost's here?"
"Upstairs in intensive care, has been for two months waiting on a kidney and liver transplant," Cooper confirms, giving the wedding ban another nervous turn. "He should be dead, but he's been stubbornly hanging on."
"We can still get the confession," Ellie realizes, excitement thrumming in her veins. Cooper's already pasty face goes a nasty shade of white.
"I'm not going up there," he refuses, shaking his head and lowering his voice. "I was in there earlier and I swear his room's haunted."
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Ellie scoffs, "you don't honestly believe-"
"I know you saw them too," he hisses, and Ellie's struck dumb by the raw fear in his round eyes. "They were right there in the cemetery in front of us. No one ever believes me, but they're always there, I can feel them," he says, shuddering violently. "I hate that bloody place, but Hardy wanted to bust my fucking balls so he sent me over there-"
Ellie holds up a hand, silencing him.
"Alec told you to drive to the cemetery?" she asks incredulously and a faint blush spots Cooper's pale cheeks. "Alec Hardy ordered you to check the cemetery?" she repeats and Cooper nods sheepishly. Maybe Hardy hadn't been the only one who had been completely wrecked by the Sandbrook case. His former DS is clearly spooked.
Cooper nearly rips his wedding ring off as he mumbles, "I was so freaked out by the ghost. I only went in there because of the smoke."
"What smoke?" Ellie struggles to recollect what happened, but everything was a blur after Norseman realized he wasn't confessing to Phoebe's mother and resisted arrest.
He'd thrown her onto the hallowed ground, grasping her ankles so hard he'd leave bruises. He'd dragged her across the slick wet grass and into the spread of his legs, pawing at her with grimy nicotine-stained fingers as she'd fought him tooth and nail-
"Don't tell him what happened, not yet," Cooper pleads with her, jarring her out of her reverie with a touch on her bruised shoulder. The starburst of pain grounds her in Wilson Memorial's white sterilized hallways.
"He's going to lose his bloody mind when they tell him that it was Derrick Norseman, but if he finds out that Norseman could've raped you…" he trails off ominously and glances over her shoulder at the entrance to A&E.
"He wasn't going to rape me," Ellie protests, but Cooper's arrival had made it so that she never had to think about what the cold-blooded suspect might've done with her alone. "I had it under control," she insists, lifting her chin and throwing her shoulders back.
"I know," Cooper concedes with a respectful nod. "That's why I'm going to stay here and wait for DI Worthington and CS Smith to take over, and you should sneak upstairs before they move Norseman to intensive care."
"He won't talk to me," Ellie blurts out. She's no longer certain if they're discussing Frost or the ghost that still plagues them both. "I've tried everything." Wringing her hands, she blinks at the lights to stave off the familiar pinprick of tears.
"Try again," Cooper urges her and gives her directions to Frost's hospital room. "We need closure, all of us," he reminds her solemnly as they split up.
Worthington calls her before she enters the lifts, and Ellie spends twenty minutes on the phone answering tedious questions and issuing an informal statement of what exactly transpired in the cemetery with Norseman. When Ellie requests permission to interview Frost, her boss shuts her down.
"We already have someone in there with him," Worthington explains testily, "Frost isn't going to last much longer and I'm tired of running interference throughout this whole bloody investigation. Go home and rest."
But Ellie can't rest. Her boss offers her an extended weekend of rest and relaxation, and Ellie kicks it off by wandering the fourth floor of the hospital until she finds the place where she waited for Keira to come running out of the waiting room.
Ellie closes her eyes and thinks about what she would be willing to do to have one more minute with Alec Hardy. She'd spent so many sleepless nights dwelling on what she might've said or done if she'd had more time with him, but her heart sinks at the idea of seeing him blank-faced like the flickering shades of poor Molly and Phoebe. Ellie nods off still thinking about it, and jolts awake with a voicemail from her boss.
"Sorry, Richardson, change of plans. The service is bloody awful here, but if you're near Wilson Memorial, I need you in Frost's room-" The message breaks up and then Worthington's voice comes in clear again. "He's not answering his phone and they're going to move Norseman to intensive care. If someone cocks up this investigation again, or the press gets wind of this before we've got definitive proof, then we'll all lose our jobs. I'm counting on you to do whatever it takes."
Ellie checks the time on the voicemail and curses. With her heart hammering in her chest, she hurries past the doors that led to where she'd last seen Alec alive with his daughter. There's a family camped out in the waiting room with blood shot eyes that follow Ellie into the ICU. A code's been called in one of the rooms at the opposite end of the hall, and she slips in past the temporarily vacated desk. Cooper had remembered the bed number, but upon seeing the open door and the tank next to the bed, Ellie wonders if he might have gotten it wrong.
She corners a tired nurse who doesn't look much older than Frost's victims, expecting to be redirected.
"He's in there," the girl says as a delirious woman in another room hollers about MI6 kidnapping her, while a real killer sits behind an unlocked door less than twenty feet away. Shaken, Ellie watches her go, wondering if she'll ever find out about the accusations against Frost.
As soon as Ellie steps into Frost's room she understands the lax security. The bloated man on the bed is unconscious and hooked up to so many wires, tubes, and monitors that there's no way he could lift a finger without an alarm going off.
"Jesus Christ."
Ellie swallows down the bile that rises up in her throat. She firmly believes that Frost killed Molly and Phoebe with Norseman's assistance, but this is a hard death to wish upon anyone. Immediately her thoughts go straight to Alec and the long drawn out death he'd narrowly avoided. This was the last thing he wanted, but maybe if he had gone home with her that day instead of into the operating theatre, he would've lived just long enough to see her solve his case. She squeezes her eyes shut, but it's too late, the mere thought of him is enough to summon him.
"Miller?"
When she opens her eyes, there's a man reflected in the monitor, standing behind her.
But Ellie's not afraid; she's been waiting for him.
A/N: Second half of this chapter is coming soon and I promise you'll get some explanations. I posted this because I'm so tired of rewriting the ending and I'm hoping I'll stop picking at the second half like a bloody scab. I have like 15 other alternate endings and I'm still not sure I posted the right one. I loved and hated parts of all of them and nothing was perfect, but I'm determined to finish this.
