[NOTE: This Takes Place 1-2 Years In The Future, By Now I Assume She Took Shedletskys Last Name]
*Aphrodite Was Running Around In A Flower Field She Trips And A Male Helps Her Up.. He Was A Bacon?*
??: "Need Some Help?"
Aphrodite: "Yes Please.."
Eliza: "I'm Eliza, You?"
Aphrodite: "I'm Aphrodite Shedletsky"
Eliza: "Shedletsky? Like Your Related To THE Shedletsky?"
Aphrodite: "Nah.. I'm Just Adopted"
Eliza: "Still Pretty Cool, Maybe Hang Out Sometime?"
Aphrodite: "Sure!"
*The Two Exchange Phone Numbers And Go There Seperate Ways, That Night I Assume Shedletsky Threw A Pillow At Aphrodite To Go To Bed And Stop Texting Eliza Was 2 A.M.*
" You know, I wouldn't be completely against someone wanting to mess up my lipstick tonight. You still need to be worthy of course, but, since it is apparently tradition, perhaps I could lower my standards just a bit... "
Alrighty, introducing the OC I made specifically to give Alec an opportunity for post-series fluff, I present to you, Eve Hardy. This started as a way to sort of get a feel for who she is, and apparently she kinda sounds like me. Oops. No one said this wouldn't be messy.
Could I have written this with Tess? Maybe, but I don't feel confident in my ability to write her, which is why she tends not to show up for more than a short time in the few fics I've written so far. Anyhow. Enjoy. And please feel free to rip this one to shreds if I did a bad job. I can't tell if I did okay or if this is hot garbage. I'm not sure about the way I characterized Alec. For real this time: enjoy. Hopefully. Shutting up now.
JUST KIDDING COMMENTS ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED OKAY BYE-BYE MWUAH.
Bong! Bong! Bong!
Eve woke with a start as the grandfather clock chimed in the corner of the room. She lifted her hands to wipe at her eyes, as though attempting to clear the frost from a window pane. What time was it? Clearly the hour had just changed, given that the clock had chimed. Pressing her hand into the couch below her, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her legs curled beneath her, a movement that brought with it a wave of prickly pins and needles, like the concept of television static made tangible. It made her shudder. There were worse things to wake up to, sure, but that didn’t exactly make the pins and needles any better in their own right.
Cobwebs cleared, Eve heaved a yawn and turned her head to look at the clock. Two in the morning. Wonderful. And she hadn’t brushed her teeth before falling asleep, as was evident by the garlicky taste in her mouth. The television was still on in the corner of the room, playing what appeared to be a rerun of The Office. Why hadn’t Alec woken her up to go to bed? Surely at around ten o’clock, he would have realized she’d fallen asleep again and come to collect her, wouldn’t he? An irritated frown worked its way onto her face before the sound of a dying pig reached her ears. Or, no, wait, strike that. That was Alec, snoring away in the easy chair on the other side of the room. No wonder he hadn’t woken her up. It’d be a little hard to do that when he himself was out cold.
As the pins and needles sensation finally faded from her legs, Eve pushed herself up to go to her husband. Boy, he really must have been tired if he’d fallen asleep in the easy chair. Normally he complained that it didn’t support his head well enough for him to sleep. She stared at him, a soft smile playing about her lips. He worked so hard. So relentlessly. Seeing him finally rest, if only so that he could throw himself right back into the case come morning, was a balm to her weary, worried soul. She reached out, not really thinking about it, and brushed the hair from his forehead. However, she quickly retracted her hand upon finding the hair to be wet. Oh, dear. That couldn’t be good. Was he getting sick? She pushed Alec’s hair back again, shuddering at the feeling of the cold sweat on her hands, and laid her hand on his forehead, backside down. Hot. Burning hot. Fire-of-a-thousand-suns hot. Accidentally-ate-a-jalapeño-on-top-of-a-poblano-on-top-of-a-habanero-pepper hot. Oh yeah. Definitely sick. She knew he hadn’t been feeling spectacular that day, but this fever put him on a whole other level of “not feeling spectacular” in her mind.
New problem: what were the next steps? To treat a person with a fever, one should cool that person down and have them take a fever reducer, but Alec was asleep. Should you wake a person to take fever medicine? Eve patted her pockets and swore under her breath when she couldn’t locate her cell phone. Where was the darn thing when she needed it?
Alec groaned quietly, still asleep, and Eve watched as his body seemed to vibrate. There was no blanket over him, so he must have been cold. Funny, how he could feel so warm to the touch and yet himself feel as though he were freezing. She pushed the hair back from his forehead once again and stepped away. The linen closet was sure to have blankets inside. Washcloths, too. She could grab one of each. The dry blanket over Alec’s body would keep him warm, and she could put the washcloth on his forehead to keep him cool once she’d dampened it.
Eve carefully ascended the stairs to the second floor and went straight to the end of the hallway at the top, where she threw open the door to the linen closet and pulled out the first blanket she found. It was a pink, fluffy thing that Alec would never touch under normal circumstances. The only reason it had made it into the house in the first place was because it was a well-meaning gift from Eve’s grandmother. It was big enough to cover Alec from toes to shoulders while not being particularly scratchy, so . . . good enough, despite the color that would make even the staunchest pink-lover’s eyes bleed. She tossed the fluffy monstrosity over her shoulder and reached down to the bottom shelf, where the washcloths were kept. Once again, she pulled out the first one she found, colored a nice pewter gray. It would do just fine.
Back to the stairs she went, making sure not to run down them with her typical thunderous footsteps that Alec had told her time and time again were loud enough to wake the dead. Best not to test that theory right now. A zombie rising up from the ground just to tell her to lighten her footsteps wasn’t the first thing on Eve’s list of current wants or needs.
At the bottom of the stairs, Eve pivoted left and went straight back to the living room, dropping all but one edge of the blanket so that it could unfurl as she walked. Upon reaching poor Alec, Eve tucked the corners of the blanket in around his shoulders, almost like the world’s most terribly secured toga. But, as was swiftly becoming her motto, it would do. It was good enough. Following the edges of the blanket, she continued to tuck the fabric in around her sick husband’s body, even to the point of securing it around his feet. His sockless, slipperless feet that she’d told him to cover up a million times because it was too cold to be running around barefoot. But did he listen? Clearly not. Once he bore a striking resemblance to a Barbie™ sarcophagus, she stepped back and allowed herself a moment to smile. Were he well and awake, he’d never have let her turn him into a pink mummy. Not that she was taking advantage of his sick, passed-out state. No, not at all.
Next was the washcloth, which she’d discarded on the nearby coffee table in order to properly secure the blanket. She picked the thing back up, plodded toward the kitchen, and turned the faucet on, running the washcloth beneath the cool water and watching as the gray cloth darkened with the stuff. Then, she wrang it out, squeezing the excess liquid from the fibers. Poor Alec had enough water-based trauma after finding Pippa’s body in the river. The last thing he needed was a cold, dripping wet cloth on his head in his sleep. Hello, Nightmare City. A damp cloth, she reasoned, would be okay, though. It wouldn’t drip. It wouldn’t cause water to run down his skin, dragging him back to the rush of the river and the weight of the little body in his arms. As long as there weren’t any water droplets running down his skin, he’d be okay, right?
She headed back to Alec, still slumbering in his chair, and laid the cloth on his forehead, spreading it out to cover as much of the area as possible. Now, back to the problem of fever reducer. Should she wake him to take it? Eve returned to the couch and found her phone tucked between the cushions. Naturally. Where else would it have ended up? A quick search later, and . . . no results. No useful results, anyway. Damn it. A second glance through the given results revealed that it was recommended to let a feverish child sleep, so perhaps it was the same for adults. She’d grab the Nyquil just in case he woke up, but she wouldn’t wake him up herself.
Back to the second floor Eve trudged, stopping at the first door on the right. Why hadn’t she remembered to grab this on her first lovely jaunt up the stairs? Into the bathroom she went before pulling open the mirror to get at the medicine. Luckily, the compartment behind it wasn’t exceedingly big, so she was able to quickly locate the Nyquil, pull it and its little dosage cup (ooh, and the thermometer, she’d need that later on) from the bottom shelf, and trudge right back on downstairs, where she placed the bottle on the coffee table and settled herself back onto the couch. She’d rest there for the night and take Alec’s temperature when he woke up. She knew he was a grown man, perfectly capable of taking care of himself, but she also knew that under no circumstances could he be trusted to actually do that. “Bastard,” she thought fondly. Her bastard husband who couldn’t be bothered to eat most days and only seemed to sleep when he was physically about to drop. One day she’d successfully nag him into making permanent healthy lifestyle changes, but this was not that day. Night. Time. Whatever.
Just as the warm embrace of sleep finally began to overtake Eve, an ambulance came wailing by, screeching like a fussy toddler determined to avoid a much-needed nap at all costs. Twin groans rose up from both husband and wife as they rose to sit up properly.
“Eve, love, what’s… What’s goin’ on?” Alec asked, slowly waking up despite feeling as though his head were stuffed with cotton and his blood were made of syrup. “What time is it?”
Eve merely shook her head.
“Time to take your temperature and get some fever reducer in your body. How do you feel?”
“Not good. I’m too warm an’ too cold an’ achy to move around.”
That about sounded like a fever. Once again, Eve lifted herself out of her relatively comfy spot on the couch to go feel Alec’s sweaty forehead. Unsurprisingly, it was still warm, though less so due to the washcloth.
Standing above him like a tired guardian angel, Eve replaced the washcloth on his head.
“Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. And the hard way does involve me bodily pinning you to the chair. You can walk away from the hospital, but you can’t walk away from me.”
Ellie had told her about that particular incident. How he’d decided, against the advice of every medical professional inside the Broadchurch hospital, to waltz on out of his bedroom and back to the police station where they worked.
“Hardheaded,” the DS had called the behavior.
“Boneheadedly stupid,” Eve had called it, dispensing with all pretense of politeness.
Back in the present, Alec fixed Eve with a steely glare that lasted all of half a second before he went limp in the chair, nodding weakly.
“Aye, lass. We can do it the easy way. It’s too late at night to be puttin’ up a fight.”
Damn, he really must have been sick to just lay down and let her fuss. She’d have to call in tomorrow and say that he wouldn’t be going to work. Lord knew he wouldn’t do it on his own.
“...good. Let’s take your temperature and make sure this isn’t hospital-worthy.”
Alec murmured his assent and opened his mouth weakly as Eve turned to retrieve the little device from the coffee table behind her. It took a moment to turn on, beeping quietly and flashing all eights as she turned back to stick it beneath Alec’s tongue.
“Close mouth,” she ordered firmly once the thing was secure. Then came the waiting. It took another moment to properly assess Alec’s temperature, and Eve took that moment to tuck the blanket in again, finding that it had come loose sometime after the ambulance had come by.
“Come morning,” she mused, “you need a shower. Hopefully you’ll feel better by then, but you’ve been sweating like a pig for ages now.”
Alec, apparently not enjoying the comparison, scowled at his wife as best he could with the thermometer poking out of his mouth. Not that he could really say much to the contrary, given how Eve had discovered his fever to begin with. But he could still hold disdain for her analogy.
When the thermometer finally beeped, it read 39°C. Bad. Real bad. One more degree and it’d be a hospital trip. Oh, how Alec hated the hospital. Oh, what an utter pain in the arse it would be to get him there. Oh, what a complete and utter pain in the everything it would be to get him to stay there if that was recommended! Did doctors recommend overnight stays for fevers? Maybe for extreme cases… In any case, DI Indisposed was looking up at her, patiently waiting to hear exactly how warm he was.
“You’re sitting at 39°. If you so much as try to leave this house, I will handcuff you to the bed with the pair that Fred got you last Christmas. I doubt you’ll be able to get out of them in this condition, even if they are meant for kids.” Noticing that his hair had fallen back into his eyes, Eve pushed it away again with a fond-but-exasperated smile. “I only do this because I love you. Someone has to take care of you, and, as Ellie would put it, you’re too much of a knob to do it on your own. Now, fever reducer. I grabbed the Nyquil. Sit up as best you can while I pour it.”
Deciding it was best to just follow instructions for the time being, Alec did as he was told. Happy wife, happy life, and all that. And he really did need the medicine.
Within moments, he was presented with a little cup. The dreaded dosage cup that the dregs of medicine adhered to with a force stronger than gravity. The clear little plastic dosage cup that always seemed to go missing at the most inopportune times. The stupid clear little plastic dosage cup that contained the most vile-tasting stuff ever to be labeled as “good for you” (in the right amount and at the right time, of course). He downed the contents with a sigh and pulled a face.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” Eve said as a response to that face. “Hang on.” She took the dosage cup away and set it down on the coffee table with the Nyquil bottle, wrinkling her nose at the pair of items before making her way back to the kitchen. “Have I mentioned you’re not going into work tomorrow? Because you’re not. You’ll infect the whole building. And you’re not going in with a mask, either.”
“Do ye really think I’m that irresponsible?”
“No, but I think you are that stubborn!”
Silence. He had nothing to say to that, apparently. Eve returned to the living room and found Alec with an honest-to-goodness pout on his face. Admittedly, it was cute. She pressed the glass of water into his hand and waited for him to actually grab it before letting go.
“Drink up, you big baby. Do you think you can stand?”
He took a gulp.
“...aye. I can stand.”
“Good. Let’s get you upstairs and into bed. I’ll take the guest room for the night. I’m not risking getting sick any more than I already have.”
Alec heaved a sigh and lifted himself up, still holding onto his glass for dear life. The pink blanket fell away from him onto the floor in a messy heap of burn-your-eyes out-pink fuzz. Taking careful steps, he wobbled his way off to the stairs and up to their shared bedroom, one foot at a time while Eve prayed that he wouldn’t fall. After all, if he went down, she’d be going down with him. Then they might both need a hospital visit.
In what seemed to be a gift from the gods, Alec and Eve both made it to the top unscathed, allowing Alec to lumber off to the bedroom like a sweaty six-foot-one zombie, with Eve hot on his heels. She lingered in the doorway for a moment, watching to ensure he didn’t just keel over into the bed. Once he was sufficiently settled (in bed the proper way up for him, covers pulled up to his chin, watching her every movement), she nodded at him, blew him a kiss and smiled.
“See you in the morning, love. Don’t burn to ashes while I’m asleep.”
He tried for a faint little smile. Even with all the threatening she’d done, she really was just trying to look out for him.
…reading old threads and running across the tag re: jessica dies alone and then looking at that tag like. wow. why did i do this. i was in enough pain without that.
