Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

The clattering of hooves was muted and soft, a rhythmic pounding that slowly pulled Ellie from the hazy world that she was drifting in. Coherency was still touch and go for now but her senses were sharp enough to know that she wasn’t in that prison anymore.

“Almost there, Miller.”

Hardy. He was still tense despite their escape and from the sounds of it they had thrown off their pursuers. If there had been any. Ellie shuddered recalling the ease with which her guards had been dealt with, and she still didn’t know whether or not they had been killed or merely knocked unconscious, and she’d had no way of checking. Being blind, handcuffed, and effectively gagged put a bit of a wrench in being able to do anything easily or by herself, which was proven by the fact that she was currently squished between the saddle horn and his body to keep from falling off.

She wanted to tease him for the forced human contact, which she knew he detested. She also wanted to scoff at the means of their escape—horses, really? Who the hell used horses nowadays to do anything? And since when had they entered a freaking medieval tale?

What she really wanted to know was how the hell he knew how to ride. Hadn’t he grown up in the city?

She grumbled in response to his words, hating her inability to speak, and her fingers sought whatever they could to help ground her more. The fresh air was helping clear her head. The horse’s mane was wiry and coarse beneath her hold as she twined it in her grip, and her palm brushed up against the reins; Hardy was making sure she was securely seated having wrapped his arm around her waist, and was holding the reins in his other hand.

She wanted to ask where they were actually going—there hadn’t been any time to be given any explanation whatsoever—but she supposed it really didn’t matter. As long as they were away from the prison she was happy.

The fingers not currently entwined with mane started frantically tapping against the sleeve of his shirt, spelling out a single word. A name.

The breath hitched in Hardy’s chest as the pieces fell into place. Her capture, her unfair imprisonment, the treatment she’d received at the hands of her captors… “Tom and Fred are safe,” he said, biting back anger with difficulty. She could tell by how rough his accent had suddenly grown; when he was well and truly pissed off about something it was almost impossible to understand him. “Joe won’t get his hands on them.”

She wanted to sag with relief at the reassurance but her spine was stiff with anxiety, and her skin still ached with the spell work that was supposed to be stifling her supposed powers.

Hardy knew her well enough by now to know this. His expression, if she’d managed to see it, would have unnerved her as much as her initial rescue had. He’d seen enough of the prison—and the prisoners therein—to recognize the inhumanity concealed within its walls. To realize that they’d treated this innocent woman as badly as they did everyone else accused of magical ability—without proof, no less—made him seethe. Ellie was out of it enough still to not realize she was trembling like a leaf.

They’d have to remove her restraints sooner rather later. Bruises were already forming around the harsh clamps around her wrists, and the spell work currently wrapped around her like a blanket was making him ache with the pain.

Far, far behind them an explosion threw sheets of smoke and flame into the air; Ellie jumped in his hold and shook her head as she automatically tried to look at the source of the noise. The horse shied and tried to sidestep but Hardy kept its head and urged it onward. They were very nearly at the border and then they’d be safe momentarily.

“Prison command center exploded,” he said quietly in her ear. There shouldn’t have been anyone in that section of the building—he’d made sure that they were all held in the cells or otherwise dealt with—but if it turned out he was mistaken he didn’t much care.

The footage of the prison conditions was safe on the device currently in his pocket. He wasn’t afraid to blackmail the government itself for the way it treated his kind.

Chapter Text

“And today, we have yet another incident of illegal magic being used—by one of our own government officials, no less. Parliament member George Harrison has been arrested for evidence pertaining to spellwork cast for over five years on his wife…”

The picture on the telly was of a younger man, and one of the latest members placed into the government’s Parliament, being led out his front door in handcuffs. It was the latest breaking news and Ellie Miller was as glued to the screen as any other citizen in England that morning.

Unlike the majority, her stomach was roiling with a mix of dread and fury watching the footage. The fury was something she had managed to wrangle under her control over the decades, but the dread was more slippery. Her phone was in her hands before she had time to stop herself, her fingers tapping out a quick message.

[Your mum alright? I heard she came down with a bit of a cold.]

She had time to pull her shirt over her head and pull her hair back into a ponytail before she received a reply from Ollie. [What? No, she’s fine. Just checked in with her, she’s good.]

Stupid! she berated herself. Her old-seated dreads from her childhood was going to land her in serious trouble one day if she wasn’t more careful. No matter how many times she and Lucy fought they were still sisters, and Ellie still felt protective of Lucy. After all, her older sister’s secret would land Lucy herself in handcuffs one day, her own story splashed across the tabloids, and it would be made worse by the fact that Ellie’s name had already appeared there only a few years earlier.

Who was she kidding? Danny Latimer’s murder was several years behind them now, and Ellie’s name was still spread around—sometimes spat like a curse, other times like a relief, but it was a fact of her life now: Miller was synonymous with murder.

She quickly deleted the two texts from her history and shook her head, disgusted with herself. Lucy was fine. She had spent all of these years hiding her abilities to see the dead and to hear their stories, so she wasn’t going to be found out now.

But George Harrison had been, and he was around the same age as Ellie. With a growl of irritation she switched the telly off and hurried out of her room. Tom and Fred were at school and daycare already, respectively, and she had the house to herself for the day. Paid leave. It had been a difficult case that she and Hardy had faced the week before—harrowing, in fact, and the DCI had sent them off for a few days’ rest and relaxation before she would allow them back on the premises of Broadchurch’s police station. The only humorous thing she could pull from all of this was the fact that Hardy was probably even more high-strung and irritable than she was over the forced vacation, too work-obsessed to even think that vacation was a normal part of a job.

As she left the house, she instinctively looked for Billie. She had had to learn at a very young age to cover up the truth of her own abilities; she didn’t carry any magical ability herself, but she did have the gift of Sight—or so the town of Broadchurch had told her. Whatever that meant. The Incarnate town had never been able to explain what that meant exactly, its understanding of translating ideas to words difficult to explain, but what she was most relieved about was the fact that she wasn’t magical. To cover up the fact that Ellie could literally speak to the town she lived in, Broadchurch instructed her to call it by the name Billie, and that had been that. She didn’t know why she still bothered to look, though; she hadn’t seen the town Incarnate for close to four years, ever since the debacle of Joe’s arrest and subsequent trial came about. She could only assume that Broadchurch itself was disgusted with her due to her being married with Danny’s killer, and that was what confused and saddened her the most now.

Of course Billie was nowhere to be found this morning, a reality no different than the last few years had been, and she shrugged off her renewed disappointment to start on her way. Billie’s absence notwithstanding, she could still feel the presence of her town in her bones, could still feel the power slumbering beneath the dirt and sand, the people wandering its surface. She knew where she could find Hardy this morning within a ten-foot radius, and she wasn’t disappointed in that. Daisy was at school as well, which meant he had the house to himself this morning.

That was his first mistake. Alec Hardy was a thoroughly suspicious man, his habitual prickliness and reclusiveness wrought in part by a wife’s cruel infidelity, and by the harsher aspects of a detective’s life, and there were still times when Ellie simply didn’t know how to read him. Certainly there was a larger heart hidden beneath that prickly exterior than met the eye, but there was still something about him that made her wonder.

Billie had disliked him. That had really been the start of her animosity towards Hardy when he first came to Broadchurch, never mind the fact that the knob stole her job. Billie’s instant dislike of him had fed Ellie’s own suspicions when it came to Hardy, her thoughts always drifting to the question of why he was so disliked by the town Incarnate. No suitable explanation was ever readily available to her, and eventually those suspicions began to wane and ultimately fell away to nothing when he arrested Joe. The only thing she had, again, managed to wrangle out of Billie on the subject of Alec Hardy was the cryptic response, ‘He came to my bounds on a foggy morning.’

Whatever the hell that meant.

So Hardy was a secretive bastard, and he selfishly managed to hide all pertinent information about his past to himself while he knew almost everything about Ellie’s own. This morning, though, the tables would be thoroughly flipped, and there would be no going back for any of them when they did.

~/~/~/~/~

“Bloody hell!”

The words escaped her before she could quite stop him; they came out strangled and high-pitched as she attempted to stop them but it was too late. The little brown creature currently seated beneath Hardy’s kitchen table bared its teeth at her and hissed. “Very nice!” it said in a wrinkly old voice. “It’s no wonder we stay away from your kind, you’re all very rude.”

Hardy was more startled than she’d ever seen him before, and paler, as he stared at her from across the room. The sliding glass door to the house was still standing open, letting in the morning breeze, and for a long moment the only sound was the breaking of the waves far below them until finally her moved. With far more agility and speed than she thought he could achieve he was across the room and grabbing hold of her wrist to drag her farther inside before she could speak again. The door slid shut with a slam and the lock was turned before she could blink, and then he was dragging her through the living room.

“Tink,” he ordered briskly, “go and hide in the washroom. I’ll find you a safe space for you soon.”

“Right you are, Pup. She’ll never know I was here.” The heavily ironic tone in the little creature’s voice would have been humorous in any other scenario, but in the moment it couldn’t be. Ellie watched it go with wide eyes and gaping mouth before she pulled on Hardy’s hold, angry by his grabbing her and desperate to escape the death-clench he had on her wrist.

“Hardy! What the hell are you doing—let go of me, you wanker! I can arrest you for assault, you know—”

“Shut up, Miller!” It wasn’t a shout, that order; if it had been, she would have simply dug in her heels and shouted even louder. There was a desperation to his voice that she hadn’t heard since the days of the Sandbrook investigation, an intensity that bordered impossibly on pleading. He loosened his grip on her arm but didn’t let go of it completely until they had reached the kitchen. It was only then that he faced her completely, and she saw the hastily covered anxiety in his eyes before it was swept away with the usual stoniness she saw on him. “What do you think you saw in there?”

She gaped at him, unable to believe he was playing so deliberately dense. “You,” she spat, “talking to a- a thing in your kitchen—”

“First of all, he isn’t a thing, he’s a Brownie, and if he hears you call him a thing then your house is going to be a mess, and second, there’s no law against having a conversation with someone in your house.”

“There is when the person in your house isn’t human!” Ellie cried. “And there’s no way you can convince me that you don’t know that, either!”

“Oh, very good, Miller, you’ve finally learned to open your eyes and observe like a detective!”

That hurt, somehow. Never mind the fact that they’d solved so many cases together now—there was only one thing she could do moving forward. “You know the laws, Hardy. I have to report this to the proper authorities—”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

That was most certainly a threat; Hardy’s voice was low and even, and all the more dangerous because of it, and it made her freeze for just a moment in her act of reaching into her pocket. It was all the avenue he needed to strike out himself and grab hold of her phone. “Fucker!” she snarled, infuriated, and she made to leap for it—

“Is reaching out to the authorities really worth your sister?”

The breath literally stopped in her throat at his question, stopping her instantly. How--? No one knew! They had all been so careful over the decades, there was nothing to even imply that Lucy was anything other than perfectly normal human. “You did not just say that.”

His eyes were flat and cold, like they had been facing down Claire Ripley in the interrogation room, and his expression didn’t even twitch at her words. Hardy had a vicious streak, a subtly hidden sadistic aspect of his personality that he rarely allowed to come to light but which she had seen glimpses of over the years, and now it was turning her way. She’d cornered him, and now he was lashing out. “All it takes it suspicion, Miller,” he said softly, still holding the phone up and away from her reach. “If you want to report me to the authorities, all I have to say is one word and Lucy will be brought in for questioning herself. We’ll see how she does answering their demands on how she sees ghosts, yeah?”

Fear made the fight drain out of her with a jarring suddenness, and she slumped in his hold as the full weight of his words hit home. He knew. Over the years Ellie had suspected that a lot of reports of magical use were bluffs, lies told by people who wanted others out of the way; the authorities showed no discrepancies between the allegations—whether you were magical or not, if you were accused you were arrested and investigated. But Hardy knew.

How in the hell did he know?

“You’re a bastard.”

He barely blinked. “As a matter of fact, Miller, my parents were married.”

“Don’t be a smart-arse after you’ve blackmailed me, Hardy!” she snarled. “If you even think about saying anything about Lucy to anyone—”

“I won’t if you don’t say anything about me. I’m giving you an out, Miller. Take it, and we can move on without an incident.” To Ellie’s confusion, he handed the phone back to her, his eyes softening. There was regret in his expression, but she didn’t know in what direction it was being given at, and she was still unsettled enough she didn’t even try to figure it out.

She took it back, and pocketed it. “How did you figure it out?”

The regret sharpened in his eyes; it wrenched his mouth. “Trade secret, Miller. I’m sorry.”

Not sorry enough to rescind his threat about Lucy. Something tasted bitter in Ellie’s mouth as she looked away from him. “Yeah. I bet you are.”