Work Text:
The constant drizzle outside had left Hardy and Fred imprisoned in the house all day. For Hardy it was only a mild inconvenience, but Fred was starting to suffer from cabin fever. All of his toys had long since lost his interest and there was only so many times he could get himself stuck under the dining table.
Checking his watch to see that Miller had taken Tom shopping for new school shoes well over two hours ago, Hardy sighed. She’d warned him that this trip usually took an ungodly amount of time and arguments. He just hadn’t quite believed her.
He removed the cap from a Fruit Shoot, grabbed his tea from the counter and went back into the living room. Fred was standing on the sofa to watch the rain, gently headbutting the window as he did.
“Get down from there.” Hardy placed the drinks on the coffee table in a rush but Fred had slid dramatically into a sitting position before he got to him.
“Bored.” Fred pouted.
Hardy knelt in front of him, ignoring how one of his joints cracked on the way down. “Only boring people get bored.”
Fred scowled at him. “Bored!”
Despite a long and varied history of winning staring competitions, Fred’s screwed up features were too much for Hardy. He dragged his hands over his face and plumbed the depths of his memories of Daisy’s early years. Surely he must have learned something useful about toddlers?
He’d only moved into the Miller house a month ago, but it was already more of a home than his hut had been. The feeling hadn’t stretched towards Broadchurch itself, however. Popping to the local shops had become an almost military operation for him. He’d worked out the least travelled route and had several escape plans for when one of the bloody locals insisted on talking to him.
In the four walls of his new home, it was a completely different story. Tom had treated his arrival with an indifference that only altered when he realised he could get twice as many lifts now. Hardy knew that was the best he could hope for. If the boy hadn’t liked him, he would’ve let him know. Fred, on the other hand, had become his second, sometimes sticky, shadow. It had got to the point that Miller was almost jealous of the attention her youngest was bestowing upon him.
“I haven’t put him to bed all week!” she’d moaned just yesterday when Fred started slapping his latest favourite book against Hardy’s leg.
“I’m sure the novelty will wear off soon,” he’d reassured her.
Despite this, since he’d moved in, Hardy hadn’t spent too much time alone with Fred. He just hoped that when Miller and Tom finally returned from their shopping trip, the novelty wouldn’t have worn off to the point of Fred not being able to stand the sight of him.
With Fred’s arms still firmly crossed, Hardy looked around for some inspiration from the various abandoned toys in the room. “Cars?”
“No.”
“Mr Lion?”
Fred shook his head.
As he was beginning to weigh up the pros and cons of letting Fred run around the garden despite the weather, he spotted something on the side table that gave him hope. “How about your colours, yeah? You like colours.”
He leaned across and grabbed the small stack of colouring books to hold them in front of Fred. The boy hesitated briefly before launching himself towards the books. Hardy pulled them out of his reach.
“No snatching. What do you say?”
“Pleeeeeease!”
Hardy smiled and handed the books over. As Fred swiped at the cover to open the top one, he stood up and went in search of some crayons or colouring pencils. They were supposed to be kept in the toybox with everything else, but he’d yet to see a full set be returned once they had been used. It was more common for a pencil from a different set to make an appearance.
“Done!”
“That was quick.” Hardy took the colouring book Fred was offering him and flicked through it. Sure enough, every page was filled with a three year old’s vision of the world. “What about the others?”
Fred was already tearing his way through the last book, the others discarded on the floor. “I doneded them.”
“You can’t have finished them all,” Hardy muttered, picking up the books. He doubled checked and saw that Fred was right. The familiar sound of a child about to burst into tears made him look up from the books. “Freddie, don’t cry. There’s still-”
“Colours!” Fred screamed and started crying in earnest.
Sighing heavily, Hardy lifted Fred onto his lap and the boy buried his head into his neck. Hardy did his best to soothe him by jiggling his leg and stroking his back, but it didn’t help. The frustration of being stuck inside had finally broken Fred.
As his shirt collar grew steadily more soaked through, Hardy wondered at how small a child’s world was. He’d known many days when he felt so trapped he couldn’t breathe and the world was working against him. If only he could’ve cried until his chest hurt and fallen asleep, curled up in the arms of someone who loved him. Maybe things could have worked out differently.
Trying to remember the last time someone had found him after he’d hidden himself away, his thoughts drifted inevitably to his mother. The memories of his childhood gave him a sudden idea.
“Hey, Freddie, I might have something for us to do,” he told the boy as he arranged him so he at on his hip. He stood up and walked over to the sideboard. “If you could colour anything - anything at all - what would you colour?”
Fred sniffed. “Car.”
Hardy rummaged single-handedly through one of the draws filled with dead batteries and broken pens. “A car? Anything else?”
“Bee.”
Miraculously, Hardy found a lined notebook with only a couple of pages used. By the looks of things only a couple of phone and reference numbers were jotted down in it, alongside doodles of stars and spirals. He grabbed it and a couple of the more intact-looking pens and sat back down.
He flipped the pages of the notebook over until he found a blank one and twisted it so it was landscape.
“You wanted to colour a car?” he asked and Fred nodded, his eyes still watery. “Let’s see...”
After a couple of seconds of holding one of the pens over the paper, lost down memory lane and hoping muscle memory could guide him home, he began sketching the simple outline of a car. Fred watched on in wonder as it took shape. Hardy couldn’t have been more grateful. He was out of practise as it was. If he’d had to deal with a squirming toddler at the same time, he doubted anyone would have been able to tell what he’d intended the drawing to be.
Once the car was done, he turned to the next age and started on a cartoon-ish bee. Nodding as Fred reminded him how many legs and wings the creature should have. He even added a flower for good measure.
After twenty minutes, the notebook had several quick sketches of various animals and vehicles in it. Once the second sailboat was completed, Hardy tore the first few pages out with his mother’s writing on them and passed the rest of the pad to Fred.
“There you go. New colouring book.”
With a sincere promise to try and stay in the lines, Fred slid off Hardy’s lap and flopped onto the floor by his crayons. True to his word, Fred stuck his tongue out in concentration as he coloured the car in red slower than Hardy had seen the boy do anything before.
Now that Fred was occupied again, Hardy was left to his own devices. The house was tidy enough and it was far too early to start making dinner. He briefly considered watching TV, but doubted he could stomach a cheery weekend lifestyle show and he couldn’t watch anything more substantial properly whilst still minding Fred. It was then that his eyes drifted back to the partially used pages of the notebook and pen he’d abandoned on the side table.
He gathered them up, along with a book to lean on, tried not to think too much about what he was doing and began to draw.
The front door crashed open an hour later and the sounds of laughter came pouring into the house. Hardy looked up and saw Tom’s head poking into the living room.
“Hey,” he said shortly to Hardy who nodded in greeting. The monosyllabic relationship they shared most of the time frustrated Miller no end. She was convinced it meant one of them hated the other, but really it had more to do with neither of them being big talkers. When Hardy told her Tom sometimes came to him for advice, she calmed down considerably.
“TOM! Look!” Fred yelled, holding up the coloured in picture of the bee and flower.
“Looks great, Freddie.” He smiled at his little brother and ducked out of the room without another word. Hardy heard him thundering up the stairs and assumed he wouldn’t hear from him until he was called for dinner.
“You’d think his X-Box gets lonely the way he rushes back to it,” Miller grumbled as she walked into the living room.
“The way technology is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if that update is available by next Christmas.”
“Mummy! Look at my bee!”
In a rush of smiles and high-pitched enthusiasm, Miller was kneeling at her son’s side before Hardy could get a proper greeting in.
“Aww, that’s amazing, Freddie!” She pressed a kiss to his curls and took the drawing from him. “I love the colour of the flower.”
“You want a drink?” Hardy offered, getting off the sofa.
“Ooh, please, love.”
Hardy hadn’t taken two steps towards the kitchen when he felt something grip his trouser leg. Looking down, he was surprised to see it was Miller’s hand, not Fred’s. She was frowning at the notebook.
“Did Fred draw this?”
“No.”
“Did you draw this?”
He tried not to be insulted by which possibility she was more surprised by. “He’d finished all of his books so…”
Miller tore her eyes off the bee that, now he could see it closely, had blue socks added on, to gawp at him. “I didn’t know you could draw.”
“It’s hardly the Sistine Chapel.”
“Still.” She glanced at the tractor and dog on the next pages. “These are really good.”
“That’ll be Fred’s handiwork. Did you want tea or coffee?”
His attempt to change the subject fell flat as Miller gave Fred the book back and stood up. “If I’d tried to make him a colouring book, he wouldn’t be able to tell what any of it was. My stick men would probably scare the life out of him actually.”
She wrapped her arms around his middle and rested her head against his chest. Despite his embarrassment he returned the hug and gently pulled her bun loose so he could run his fingers through her hair.
“Did you manage to find shoes for Tom?” Hardy asked.
Miller pulled back enough to see his face. “Yeah, but it was a nightmare. Was half-tempted to drive up to- what’s that?” She broke the hug to pick something off the sofa. It was only when her eyes went wide that Hardy realised what it was.
“Oh, that’s just-”
“It’s Fred,” she whispered.
He could feel the heat rising in his cheeks as he looked at the picture in her hand. In the space not taken up with once important scribbles was a sketch of Fred, sprawled out on the floor, colouring in. The shading wasn’t quite finished and Hardy wished she hadn’t seen it until it was done, if at all. The bits he’d struggled with stuck out to him and he knew he could’ve done better.
Miller sat down on the sofa, still studying the drawing. Hardy followed her but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“It’s beautiful,” she eventually said with a smile. “You’re really good.”
“Nah, it’s-”
“Shut up. It’s fantastic.” She kissed him before he could protest further. “Where did you learn to draw like this?”
“Nowhere,” he told truthfully with a shrug. “Spent a lot of time in my room as a kid. Used to sketch random things to pass the time.”
“What? You taught yourself?”
He took the drawing from her and tried to see it through her eyes. “I just copied stuff around me and the paintings my mum had in the living room. Wild flowers. Rural landscapes. You should see my Glaswegian tower blocks. Had plenty of practise with them.”
“I’d like that,” she said softly, tracing the the pen marks.
“I wasn’t...” Hardy trailed off when she looked up at him. He hadn’t drawn anything since Daisy was young. Even then, Tess never took too much notice. He’d been with Ellie for months now and how much she cared about him still took him by surprise.
“When you’ve finished showing me your tower blocks,” Ellie said as her cheeks began to blush, “maybe you could draw me like one of your French girls?”
“I’m flattered that you think I had even one French girl.”
She laughed and wrapped an arm around his waist to cuddle up to him.
“You… were you being serious?” Hardy asked. “About drawing you? Would you want that?”
“Umm… I dunno.” She scrunched her nose up adorably. “Yeah? Maybe? Could be fun, I ‘spose.”
“It could end in an argument.”
“Oh, definitely.” Ellie slid her arms up so they rested around his shoulders and leant in so he could make out the different shades of brown in her eyes. “But that’s half the fun, isn’t it?”
She kissed him then and he wondered for the fourth time that day alone how he could possibly have been lucky enough to have met this woman. He knew exactly how him drawing her would end. He’d get frustrated with himself for not being good enough and she’d get bored and fidgety. Then he would snap, she would retaliate and they’d end up having sex on his sketch book.
Hardy briefly considered how painful papercuts could be.
“Mummy! Mummy! Look!”
They broke their kiss so they could see which masterpiece Fred was trying to show them but stayed sitting close enough that their thighs were touching on the sofa. Hardy kept a hand on the small of her back as she spoke to Fred. This sort of casual affection and intimacy was supposed to have been lost to him. Sometimes, especially when he first moved back to Broadchurch, he found it overwhelming, but now it felt almost normal.
When Fred went back to his drawings, Miller retrieved his picture of her son.
“It won’t get better if you keep staring at it,” he mumbled, trying to take it from her.
She frowned at him. “I don’t want it to get better. I was just wondering if I could keep it?”
“Keep it?”
“Yeah. Could put it on the fridge? Or get a frame and-”
“Ellie,” he interrupted gently, “it’s not… It’s on lined paper. I did a shitty job with his hands.”
She bit her lip. “Could you do another one?”
He stared at her. There was no way he would ever work out what he did to make her look a him like she did. All he knew was that he had sworn to himself that he would do everything he could to keep this woman happy for as long as he was allowed to.
“Probably,” he replied and she kissed him again.
It took weeks until he had enough time and the right equipment to do a sketch of Fred, this time with Tom as well, that he was relatively proud of. It was another week after that until he was prepared to show it to Miller. She teared up and stuck it to the fridge with magnets next to Fred’s potato prints and Tom’s football rosette straight away. That night, he started sketching Ellie, but didn’t get very far as she dragged him onto the bed with her.
Several months later, when the edges of the drawing on the fridge began to curl and he had an entire sketch book of quick portraits of Ellie, he found the original picture of Fred in the drawer of Ellie’s bedside table. In contrast to his newer drawings, it was terrible, his lack of practise even more evident.
Although, he thought with a smile, there was something about seeing it in the same drawer as Fred’s baby book and Tom’s first school photo that made him prouder of the rough sketch than he was of anything he had drawn since.