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Contrary to popular belief, Alec Hardy doesn't actually have a death wish.
Mostly, what he has is a wish to quit having to deal with all this annoying shite.
It looks like this: Hardy has known that there was a problem with his heart much longer than doctors have been pestering him about fixing it. He knows this for a fact because he'd gone through three separate doctors before he'd stumbled upon one who actually took the empty throb in his chest as something serious.
Three separate doctor's he'd seen. Each with months of phone calls to try and find a practitioner that was taking patients ahead of them. Days of waiting to be called back without hearing anything. Struggling to make room in his schedule only for sudden cancellations and rescheduling forcing him to start over from scratch.
All for the reward of finally going into the office only to hear that he's just overreacting.
"You work a very stressful job," all of them had pointed out in one way or another. "Have you considered that it might just be stress? Anxiety? Have you ever heard about panic attacks?"
Hardy has heard of panic attacks. He's seen panic attacks. Had a few of them himself.
These are not panic attacks.
"There's no shame in struggling with your metal health," they'd scolded lightly when he'd told them this. "One of the symptoms of a panic attack is that feeling of dread, the fear that you might die or that there's something wrong with your heart. I'm not seeing anything coming back in your bloodwork. I don't think you have anything to worry about."
He tries to argue. Pushes the boundaries of his patience, and then pushes some more, straining more polite tones and careful words. When that fails, he lets himself get angry, snarling out questions and letting his voice threaten to shout when they still refuse to take him seriously.
One accuses him of being a drug seeker. The other two tell him to calm down, make some noises about this sort of behavior being expected, and kick him out of their offices with his hands filled with pamphlets and referrals for CBT and psychologists.
All of it happens over the course of a year and a half. A full eighteen months of added stress and anger and irritation. It really shouldn't have come as a surprise that Hardy chose to give up entirely.
"How'd the appointment go?" Tess asks the day that Hardy decides he's had enough.
He shrugs listlessly, not quite meeting her eye. "Same shit as usual," he tells her. "I don't think I'm going to try to find another opinion."
She barely blinks at this news, but then, she doesn't seem to care about most of what he says these days. Hardy's too preoccupied to decide whether or not this bothers him. They're both busy with work, and he's been driving himself crazy chasing doctors, so maybe it should just be expected. He tries to figure out what he could do to try and patch this gap before it gets too bad but can't manage it (Tess always was the one with the social skills).
(Part of him wonders if it might even be better. If this really is a serious issue, but there are no doctors that will listen to him long enough to find the problem, much less treat it, will he die? Will her pulling away now be for the best? Will it make the sting of his death hurt any less?)
(Fuck if he knows.)
Hardy gives up on the doctors and decides that that's that.
He tries his best to muddle through managing it on his own, but it's nearly impossible to tell how much of a difference it makes.
He tries to guess at how to alter his diet in ways that might be healthier, but he's always been a picky eater and cutting out foods from his already limited choices is hard enough without playing this bullshit guessing game. He stops driving Daisy to school and hitches rides with other people whenever he determines he can get away with it because he's started getting worried that he'll crash his fucking car if his heart stops working on the road. He alternates between exercising more often and exercising less because he can't figure out which one is doing him more harm than good.
Mostly, he tries to put the whole thing out of his mind.
(After all, if it is anxiety like the doctors have been saying, then dwelling on it is probably only going to do him more harm than good, right? Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that.)
(Except it's too fucking hard to not think about it. He's always thinking about it. He thinks about it when there are buildings with no elevators, when he has to haul his body up the stairs he thinks about how it didn't used to be this hard, thinks about the seemingly inevitable possibility that the lightheadedness will overwhelm him and send him tumbling down the steps one day. He thinks about it as he eats the few meals he can handle, grateful for once that his shitty social skills mean that no one wants to ask him to pubs or diners after cases, one less thing he has to worry about explaining away. He thinks about it when the stutter of his heart in his chest makes his vision blur out and his hearing fade into white noise, those seconds of certainty that this is the time it kills him, the time his heart has stopped for good. It never really is, but it never stops feeling like it could be.)
(He thinks about it when he wonders if it wouldn't just be easier for this time to be that time.)
(He thinks about it and he can't fucking stop.)
Later, people will yell and berate and snarl at him for not taking care of himself. "Why did you let it get this bad?" they'll ask him, skepticism and disbelief heavy in their voices. By then, he'll be too tired to point out that he had tried and hadn't gotten anywhere. And anyway, it's still his own fault, isn't it? He could have tried the fourth doctor. The fifth, the sixth. He probably should have kept trying.
There is a lot that Hardy could have done that he didn't.
He's too busy trying to make it through each day as it comes.
It's not until the Gillespie case that he finally finds an answer. His diagnosis at the cost of a child's body in the river.
He sees her there that afternoon, floating face-down in the water in her pajamas, and any trace of rational thought flies out of Hardy's mind. He doesn't see her unnatural stillness, the odd contortion of her body, the way the fabric strains around her limbs. He looks at her and believes, senselessly, that there might still be time.
There isn't.
But he jumps into the river without a second thought, letting the cold shock his system ruthlessly as he pushes through sludge and water. He's never been the strongest swimmer, but he doesn't care, he can't let it matter because there might still be time. The mud beneath his feet gives way to cold currents and he struggles his way deeper anyway, lets the algae and debris skip over his tongue and hit the back of his throat as he strains to reach her. There's water in his eyes, in his nose, in his mouth, filling him up as the dull empty stutter of his chest bangs hollow inside of him. Her skin is clammy cold under his fingers, but he holds on anyway. Chokes out senseless platitudes through mouthfuls of water as he gets his arms around her and fights back to shore. The edges of his vision are technicolor black ants, but it doesn't matter, it can't because there might still be time.
He barely makes it to the shore conscious. Has enough time to retch up water and bile and yell unintelligibly for whatever DS came with him here before the dark pressure in his chest and head overwhelms him. Just enough time to pull her out of reach of the water, not enough time to start doing chest compressions, not enough time to think about whether or not it'd make a difference.
Just long enough for her face to be branded onto the backs of his eyelids until the day he fucking dies.
He wakes up in the ambulance, tied down with wires and plastic masks with the repetitive stumble of something beeping in his ears. Has just enough time to ask if she's okay before he's dragged under again, held under the currents by the oppressive force of his exhaustion.
The next time he surges back into consciousness, he hardly has time to breathe before he's being berated from all sides. His wife wanting to know what he was thinking, nurses telling him to quit wrestling with the IVs and oxygen mask, doctors scolding him for waiting so long to seek treatment for such a serious health condition.
He'd nearly drowned in the river, they tell him, and then he'd had a heart attack on the shore. Scared the hell out of his DS and nearly died for the honor of having to tell a mother that her child is dead.
"You need to take this seriously," his new doctor tells him sternly. "It took us two tries to get your heart to start beating again."
Hardy signs himself out of the hospital against medical advice (if he really needed to take it that seriously, then it shouldn't have taken so long to be noticed by someone other than himself, right?) and lets himself be bullied into making a follow-up appointment only because they tell him it's a requirement if he wants to be cleared for work.
Tells his boss that they're only being overly cautious about his lungs, and gets back to work.
(He can't get her face out of his mind. He has to solve his case. It's the only chance he has of her letting him rest.)
He misses the appointment. Falls asleep in his office while going over interviews and doesn't even think about it until Tess starts reaming him for getting a missed-appointment fine. Even then, he's too busy with the investigation to even think about scheduling another one. Not until he nearly passes out at the wheel while driving home, at least. That's when he grudgingly makes the appointment and sets enough alarms and reminders on his phone to actually follow through.
It's not like he wants to die. It's not like he's just been waiting around for his heart to finally give out on him (he doesn't yet think that he deserves it). It's just that he's so fucking tired. Exhausted and worn thin by his failing health and the never-ending pressure to solve this case, and the ordeal of having to explain from scratch all over again is something he'd rather not add onto his plate. He's done this song and dance three bloody times already and got nowhere. Why let himself go through the ordeal a fourth time?
Some things aren't worth the trouble.
(Sometimes he thinks he'd rather die with that vice around his heart and that empty beat against his lungs than suffer through the indignity of laying himself out to be seen and prodded by doctors who can't even pretend to give a shit. Would rather die from the not knowing than go through it all again and still leave with the echoes of their casual dismissal ringing in his ears.)
Still, he goes, because that's what's expected of him. He gets scolded for not taking his health seriously, for missing the last appointment, for losing five pounds in the weeks since he was last there, and sits through the battery of tests and agrees to the next follow-up appointment because he might as well at this point. The doctor tells him to take notes, keep a personal record of his symptoms and attacks so that she can go over it the next time he comes in.
Hardy agrees, because he might as well. It's farther than he's gotten before, isn't it? Might as well listen and see what happens this time. He goes out and buys a notebook exclusively for this purpose instead of listening to the doctor and trying to figure out a way to track it all on his phone (which would really just be a way of ensuring that he never does it at all) and does try.
But the thing about taking notes on what's unusual is that it can get rather hard when the unusual is just your normal.
He tries to take the notes as best as he can, but he is busy during the day, and trying to remember things later never works because almost nothing stands out anymore. Nearly passing out when he rises from his chair, the stutter of his heart knocking all the air out of his lungs, the fatigue so thick he can barely see through it; these things are just normal now. He's aware of the fact that he should be taking notes but is either too tired to go through the effort or too disillusioned with the whole concept of doctor's orders to even bother trying.
Said doctor seems less than impressed with his efforts but keeps her berating to a minimum this time. Probably because it's now her job to tell him that his heart is so fucked up that he'll be lucky to even make it through the surgery for the pacemaker he's going to need if he wants to live longer than a couple more years.
It figures. The first time he gets an answer out of one of these doctors and it's the knowledge that he's dying and has been for a while now.
He goes home with his hands full of information packets about the surgery and its recovery and packets full of pills that will try to handle his symptoms and a thick sense of impending doom hanging over his head.
(But really, he's been feeling the threat of that blade for a while now.)
Hardy doesn't even get a chance to say hello, much less bring up the news he'd gotten, before he's faced with the teary eyes of his wife, her hands shaking as she reaches for him and tells him to sit, that she has something to tell him and it's important and it's not good.
He's so busy filling himself up with the terror of the possibility that something happened to Daisy that it almost doesn't register what she's actually telling him. That she'd gone to search Ashworth's car with SOCO since he had been busy with the doctor, and they had found the evidence that they'd needed to make the arrest, found the evidence that would have sealed this case as solved.
The evidence she left in her car when she went to fuck their coworker and came back an hour later to find stolen and gone.
Part of him is so angry he can't see straight. Part of him is already busy tearing away at himself with guilt and self-recrimination because if he had been better then none of this shit would have happened.
He wants to scream at her, demand what the fuck she was thinking, why the fuck she would do something so stupid.
Wants to stare God or the Universe or whatever in the eyes and demand why the fuck he has to deal with this on top of everything else. He gets the news that he's dying, might not even survive the surgery that might have solved this problem moth ago before things had even gotten a chance to get this bad, and doesn't even get a chance to tell someone before this shit is being heaped onto his plate.
One more fucking thing for him to deal with. For Alec fucking Hardy who can't catch a single fucking break to cope with. Who can't even get a good breath in before life is kicking him in the face all over again.
He doesn't bother with any of it. Can't even find the energy to look Tess in the eyes, much less God. He leaves as quickly as he had come, gets into his car even though he know he shouldn't just to have somewhere else to be, and after hours of aimless driving he doesn't let himself think too hard before pulling into the station parking lot.
He takes the fall himself. If life saw fit to put this on his plate then he's going to be the one who deals with it. Plenty of people in the department make it clear that they're not buying it, but he's not about to admit that it's anything less than the absolute literal truth, and it isn't as if Tess or Dave are offering up an alternate explanation.
(Later he'll wonder why the fuck it was all so easy but reminds himself that it doesn't matter. As long as Daisy is taken care of, none of it matters. If Tess had taken the fall, lost her job and the trust of her daughter, then when Hardy died it would have destroyed Daisy entirely. It doesn't matter what he has to deal with, he's not going to live that much longer anyway.)
Hardy gets taken off the case (not that there's much of a case left at this point). Technically doesn't lose his job. Gets torn to shreds by the media. Doesn't go back to his doctor. Files for divorce. Makes no attempt to get full custody of Daisy (not that it would matter anyway. Even if Hardy wasn't practically on death's door, Daisy doesn't talk to him anymore, doesn't answer his calls, won't even look at him the few times he tries to see her. The only reason Tess hasn't used that to make sure he never gets custody of her is because she isn't willing to see how far his silence will go. Neither of them know about his heart, and with things as they are, Hardy can't see the point in bringing it up now.)
He's too tired to push it.
(But really, what else is new?)