Work Text:
“Who the hell does that woman think she is?” Ellie growled.
Hardy had to jog a couple of steps to catch up with her. “The defence.”
“Does she have to be such an arse about it though?” She joined the queue for the coffee cart. Months of hard work to catch the bastard and their witnesses were being rinsed in the box with false accusations. “If I wanted to see shit getting thrown around for no reason I’d go see the monkeys at Longleat.”
As she hunted in her bag for her purse, Ellie heard something that she had never heard before.
She turned around and saw that Hardy was laughing.
Actually, properly laughing.
He finished with a sigh and peered over the queue to look at the price list.
“What the fuck was that?”
Hardy looked down at her with a frown as though he had no idea what he had just done. “What?”
“You… you just laughed.”
“And? It was funny.”
Momentarily lost for words, she gaped at him, the trial forgotten. “But… You never laugh. Six years I’ve known you. Not once have you laughed.”
It was true. She had seen him smile. All kinds of smiles, actually. The little one for when she shut down a suspect at work and the huge one that took over his entire face when he was proud of one of the kids. Even an awestruck one she had only seen once when she agreed to marry him. He smiled a lot more than people gave him credit for.
Laughter, on the other hand, was rarity. He tittered a bit if he had a drink but other than that nothing had cracked the stone exterior of Alec Hardy. He wasn’t even ticklish - and Ellie had searched for years for a spot to prove that wrong.
“Six years. Six bloody years to find out your level is monkey shit,” she yelled at him.
He laughed. Again.
“Sorry.”
“The wedding’s off.” She hiked her bag over her shoulder and stomped back towards the courtroom
“Miller, c’mon. Miller!”
“Don’t you dare come back without my coffee!”