Thomas woke to a pounding headache and the smell of bacon. The former made sense – he remembered drinking quite a bit before he presumably passed out – but the latter only confused him. He wondered if he'd attempted to make himself dinner, which would have been a terrible idea considering the state he must have been in, and left the stove on. It didn't smell burnt, though.
With a sigh, Thomas got out of his bed, noting that he hadn't even bothered to change out of his clothes – and decided to make his way to the kitchen to see what was going on. He wasn't surprised to see it was dark out when he passed the window in the hall – he'd begun his binge some time shortly after noon if he recalled correctly – but what he was surprised by was the person standing at the stove, frying several strips of bacon and two eggs.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, his voice sounding far too loud against his headache.
Danielle turned around, arms folded in front of her chest. "You don't remember, do you?"
He shook his head and regretted it right away when a stab of pain shot through him.
"I'm not surprised," she said, turning back to check on the food. "You'd had over half a bottle of Scotch before I found you." She thought on that for a moment. "At least. It's all I found evidence of, anyway."
Thomas cringed. He knew it must have been more as he was quite sure he'd only moved on to the fresh bottle when the other one had been emptied. He didn't even want to think about what state she had found him in, and so he decided he wouldn't. If there was something he'd said or done that was of importance, she would likely make sure to tell him. "I see." He sat down at the island counter, where a glass of water and two aspirins sat. "You still haven't told me what you're doing here."
"Take them," she said, still not giving him an answer. "How do you like your eggs? And how crispy should your bacon be?"
Thomas raised an eyebrow, though he knew she couldn't see, and asked, "You're making food for me?" He was fairly sure he knew why she was here – he'd turned everything he'd had on her over to the tabloids after all – and he found it quite suspicious that she would be kind enough to feed him and help relieve his hangover. "You wouldn't be trying to poison me, would you?"
She turned with an exasperated sigh. "No, Hunt, I'm not trying to poison you. I'm going to make sure you're of sound mind when I rip you a new one."
"Ah," he said, as if it was a perfectly normal thing for her to tell him. He supposed it wasn't an entirely surprising reaction after what he'd done yesterday – or perhaps earlier today, he wasn't quite sure what time it was – and it wasn't like he was unwilling to speak to her about it. He did have a few choice words of his own for her, and he would make sure she would receive them, as well. But, first, he would eat. "Over easy and just don't let the bacon turn into a brick."
She nodded and went back to focusing on the frying pan. He remained silent, then, and decided to take one aspirin. He hoped it would help, and he was inclined to believe it would as his headache had already begun to fade before he'd taken it.
Not much later, Danielle put a plate with food down in front of him, and he didn't have to be asked twice to dig in. He was hungry, after all, and he was relatively sure that he hadn't eaten before he'd decided to drink himself into oblivion. Which had made it that much easier to achieve just that, and that much worse when he woke up just now. In any case, he thanked his lucky stars that Danielle had decided it would be appropriate to give him food in this situation, no matter her intentions.
She leaned back against the counter next to the stove, nibbling on a strip of bacon that was almost completely black as she watched him eat. He didn't comment on how uncomfortable it made him to have her watch him so closely, and he certainly didn't comment on the fact that his mind had – however briefly – entertained the idea of the two of them eating in his kitchen under different circumstances.
When he was done eating, Thomas wasn't quite sure what to say. He felt he should have thanked her for the food – and, presumably, taking care of him last night – but, somehow, he doubted she would appreciate it.
"You're done?" she said, and though it was posed as a question, he knew she wasn't asking.
He answered nonetheless. "I'm done."
"Good." She said with a nod, and she suddenly looked terribly sad. Thomas tried not to feel bad about it – she deserved to be sad, for heaven's sake – but it proved harder than he thought. "Good. Wait here, I'll be right back."
He did as she instructed, remaining just where he'd sat since he came into the kitchen, and waited for her to return. When she did, he immediately saw the cardboard box in her hands, and his heart nearly stopped. "Why do you have that?"
"Doesn't matter," she said, her expression even sadder than it had been when she'd left to retrieve the box. She put it down on the counter, moving his plate to the side to make room. "Why did you do it, Thomas? Why did you want to get rid of me?"
He noted the way she'd used his given name again – not affectionately, this time, but the way she sometimes had when she'd intended to have a serious conversation with him. He'd expected a fight – screaming and yelling and insults – but it didn't seem that that was what she'd come for. It unsettled him to no small degree.
"Because you were going to do the same to me," he said weakly.
She narrowed her eyes at him, tilting her head to one side. After taking a moment to think, she spoke. "I wasn't. I still won't," she told him, and he wasn't sure what to make of it. Another lie, surely. "What changed after we talked? I thought we were on the same page."
"I saw you. With Montmartre," he said, and by the way her expression didn't change, he knew that this was not news to her. So why did she ask then? If she was aware that he knew, why wouldn't it be obvious to her?
She let out a sigh. "So, what? You're telling me it didn't occur to you that there's more than one reason I might have gone with him? Hell, he could have made me go with him."
"You were flirting with him, I heard. You two are… you are—"
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" she exclaimed, finally displaying the anger he'd expected. "Are you trying to say you thought sending me to prison was a reasonable action because you were jealous?"
Thomas thought he ought to have been outraged at the assumption that it had been jealousy that drove him to hand the material over, but there was a much more interesting point in what she'd said that he needed to address first. "Sending you to prison? You're being overly dramatic. If – and that's a big if, mind you – you'd have been prosecuted at all, it would have been for negligence at worst. And you were a student at the time, you would—"
"You never even bothered to look through what's in here, did you?" she interrupted, nudging the box closer towards him. "Go on, take a look."
"Well, I saw the settlement agreement between the university and him, and…" He blanched. It was true, he had no idea what was in that box.
Danielle nodded knowingly. "It's my signature on that contract." Thomas felt like the rug was being pulled out from under him. "It's my signature on all of it."
It was obvious, from the look on his face, that this was new information to him, and she almost felt some of her ire lift, but he'd still done what he'd done, whether getting her behind bars had been his intention or not. Danielle could see his hand tremble as he reached for the box and lifted the lid off.
The first thing he took out was the settlement agreement with the victim, drawn up by the university's lawyers. But the university had been kept out of it entirely, and it was only Danielle's and the victim's signature on it. Ethan had advised her back then not to let the university handle it, and if she'd listened to him, Thomas would have been right. She'd have got off lightly – because she knew that, technically, it hadn't been her fault – and as she'd been little more than a student back then, it wouldn't have impacted her career much, either.
But she hadn't listened to Ethan, and she'd let the university pay him off – all in her name because, officially, the university took no responsibility for anything that happened on set of their students' film productions – and she knew it made her look guiltier than she was.
Hunt's quiet gasp when he reached the last page and saw that it was, indeed, her signature on the contract made her look up. He simply looked back at her, stunned, before he reached into the box again to take out another sheaf of papers.
The one on top she recognised as well – she'd signed off on everything being safe just the morning of the accident. She hadn't checked it herself – hadn't had the time because she'd stayed up all night working on an essay for Professor Singh – but she'd been stupid enough to trust that the freshman she'd tasked with checking everything would do so diligently. If only she'd taken the extra time to make sure… they would have known to wait until that beam had been properly secured, and nobody would have been hurt.
It was clear from the shock on Hunt's face that this was another detail he hadn't known of. "I thought it happened because you didn't check everything that day."
"It did," she told him, trying not to be offended by the fact that he'd insinuated she might have known and simply not cared. "I signed off on it, anyway."
She could tell he had a reproach on the tip of his tongue, but he kept quiet, and she was glad for it. She didn't need anyone to tell her how careless she'd been – she felt guilty enough as it was. Instead, he put the piece of paper to the side and looked at the next one. It wasn't any better. In fact, this one, she thought, was perhaps the worst of all. It had been her list of who would be doing what that day, and she'd assigned him to operate the camera just beneath that steel beam.
"It looks like premeditation," he said, looking back up at her. "Danielle, if you hadn't caught this before… if I'd… you could have been convicted with attempted murder."
"There's more in there."
Hunt shook his head. "I don't want to see it. I know it wasn't that."
"It doesn't really matter, does it?" she said, looking down at her hands. "He…" She took a deep breath. "Carson could have died, and it would have been my fault."
Hunt shook his head again, more vehemently this time. She imagined it couldn't have been feeling good, considering his massive hangover. "But nobody died. And you weren't anywhere near experienced enough to know. Even if you'd checked everything, you could have missed it."
"It was my responsibility," she insisted. She wasn't quite sure how the conversation had taken such a turn – she hadn't come to talk about her guilt or any of this, really, but just to confront him and find out just why he'd done what he'd done.
She didn't notice she'd started crying until she felt a hand on her arm, squeezing ever so slightly. She recognised the gesture as something she'd done to calm him many times before, and her tears came even harder then.
"Danielle, I've disagreed with this policy since I've started teaching at the university," he told her. "I've wanted projects supervised by experts for a long time. Only putting students who don't know their craft yet to work – and in fields they may have even less experience, at that! – has never sat right with me."
She didn't argue with that – he had a point, after all, though it didn't change a thing about her feelings towards it all – but decided to go back to their original conversation. The reason she'd come here in the first place. "You were going to have me put behind bars for it, anyway."
This statement seemed to wipe any trace of sympathy he'd had for her away and he withdrew his hand from her arm, letting it fall to his side. "I didn't know."
"Doesn't matter," Danielle said with a shake of her head. "It doesn't. If anything, it just makes it worse – that you didn't even know what was in there; that your only goal was to hurt me. And for what? Because you thought I had a thing with Viktor?"
"Because I know you're working with him!" Hunt accused, slapping one hand down on the stone counter. She could tell from the expression on his face that it had hurt him, and she couldn't find it in her to care. He really thought she could have done that, after everything? That, more than anything he'd said to her since she'd known him, hurt somewhere deep in her chest.
She swallowed hard around the lump in her throat. Then, very quietly, she said, "But I'm not. I was just… I was just going to fix things. I was going to fix everything."