FIC: Restless (Torchwood)
Title: Restless
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Belongs to the clever boffins at Auntie Beeb.
Summary: Gwen was used to seeing a lot of strange things since she'd started working at Torchwood, but even so, seeing an apparently dead woman across the table from her was a bit unusual.
Word Count: 7,880
The first time that Gwen saw the woman in the blue blouse, she almost managed to convince herself that she was just imagining things.
The team were all sitting in the conference room, ranged around the table with Jack at one end, Gwen at the other, and with the remainder of the group split along the long sides. The surface was covered in empty and discarded coffee mugs, files and bits of paper, and each of them had a PDA in front of them. Gwen had once asked why they still had so much paper when they all worked electronically, and was given such a confused stare that she’d never asked again.
Tosh was expounded on some details regarding the latest Rift activity. Gwen had instituted weekly summary meetings during what they euphemistically referred to as “Jack’s absence” (or what Owen liked to unkindly call ‘the time the rat bastard ran off and left us’). Jack may have just picked up information from any of them whenever he felt like it, but Gwen had found it far more helpful that they all got together once a week and made sure that they were on the same page, and it gave people a deadline to work at for reports and the like.
The first Monday morning after Jack had come back, he’d been rather surprised to find them all picking up their work and heading for the conference room out of habit, and when they all admitted they found the meetings useful (giving Gwen a brief moment of pride), Jack had shrugged and agreed and taken over them immediately, as he was rather wont to.
And then, right in the middle of Toshiko’s sentence, Gwen saw her. A woman sat next to Tosh, on a seat that wasn’t there. She wore a blue blouse, accessorised with a bullet wound in her stomach from which blood issued copiously, and she stared at Gwen with tears in her eyes. Gwen jumped slightly, startled and not a little shocked.
She blinked, and the woman was gone.
No, Gwen thought. Her vision must have blurred for a moment. Tosh was wearing a blue blouse, after all, and had the same dark hair. She knew she should never have watched that Hammer Horror marathon with Rhys last night. She had enough things to give her nightmares as it stood.
“Seasonal solar activity,” Tosh said, twisting her pen in her fingers. “Bane of my life back when I had to deal with satellite communications. Interferes with the linkups and there's nothing much you can do about it. Comms aren't a problem for us, but the effect it has on the Rift is bad enough.”
She tapped her PDA, and the screen changed to some interesting looking if incomprehensible diagrams, decorated with equations that might as well have been written in Russian for all Gwen understood them.
“Increased magnetism in the upper atmosphere means the Rift tends to get a little... hyperactive. We should expect the usual increase in bits of junk appearing, and hopefully we won't get a repeat of the flying spaghetti incident.”
Gwen gave Jack a sceptical look.
Jack gestured dismissively with the stylus of his own PDA, and looked slightly pained. “God, don't ask. Took a week to sort out, and I think we accidentally started a religion. It’s all in the reports.”
Gwen nodded, and decided that she didn’t really want to know. She’d decided that some things were best left not dwelt upon after reading about the Torchwood investigations into mysterious bovine pregnancies in Swansea back in the eighties.
Jack was already moving the meeting on. He tended to like the weekly overview meetings short and relatively painless, compared to the drawn out briefings that the Police had been starting to prefer by the time Gwen left them. Ianto had once confided that Torchwood one had been fond of monthly site meetings, complete with powerpoint presentations and corporate values. Gwen could find little that was more disturbing to contemplate, but she’d had to laugh when Ianto pointed out that he used to get through them by revisiting some of his dirtiest sexual fantasies. Gwen couldn’t remember what he’d said they were. They’d both been rather drunk at the time.
Briefly, she entertained the mental image of Jack standing at the front of the room in a business suit, using a laser pointer to gesture to slides and earnestly going on about the need for “Torchwood Values”. She tried not to giggle and draw attention to herself. Ianto, at least, didn’t look like he was thinking about fantasies during this meeting. He had his head propped on his fist, eyes cast down to the PDA sitting on the desk, looking tired more than anything.
Gwen wondered if she should make him take a day off, and pester Jack into doing his own damned paperwork for once. She’d been horrified at the amount of work he seemed to be doing when she’d taken over as leader (not knowing, of course, that it would only be a short term measure), and had occasionally been forced to drag him out, literally by the hand sometimes, to get him away from work.
Jack was asking about the overnight communications intercepts that Ianto sorted through and summarised for everyone on a daily basis. “Anything we need to be worried about?” he asked, and Gwen forced her mind to stop wandering and focus on the meeting at hand.
Ianto was frowning, rubbing his forehead, but dropped his hand when Jack addressed him. “Nothing much beyond the usual chatter,” he said, poking listlessly at his screen with the stylus in his hand. “There are a few calls we can attribute to new Weevil sightings, but harmless ones, it seems; people catching sight of Weevils when they come above ground to move between sewer lines. Government and military are fairly quiet, although I did pick up a UNIT transmission. Apparently their sub-orbital carrier, the, uh…” He scrolled through his PDA, looking for the name.
“Valiant,” Jack supplied, tersely.
Gwen frowned slightly. Ianto really should have known that already. She knew it. She guessed he was a little distracted, definitely tired.
Ianto nodded. “That’s the one. It’ll be making a pass overhead, en route to Russian airspace, at fourteen twenty two.”
Tosh was already making notes. “I’ll make sure that the Hub’s in low power mode so that we don’t put out any spikes to make them curious.”
“Again,” Owen said sourly, and at Jack’s surprised and slightly confused look, shook his head. “Long and unpleasant story. Happened while you weren’t here,” Owen added, pointedly.
Jack at least had the grace not to pursue the issue, instead clearing his throat and looking at his personal screen. “Anything else?”
Gwen raised her eyes, opening her mouth to speak, but froze as she did so, staring over Jack’s shoulder. Behind him was a severe looking blonde woman. Unlike the previous apparition, there was no sign of mortal wound, but the woman stood, hands on her hip apparently yelling at Gwen, though no sound came from her. She was utterly silent, and Gwen found that she was briefly locked in place, with no idea what to say or do. No one else seemed to have noticed the woman, so surely she should say something.
“Gwen?” Jack drew her attention, and in the time it took to blink, the woman was gone.
“Yes?” she said, her voice cracking slightly.
Jack looked at her. “Anything else?”
“No,” she said quickly, then cleared her throat, and forced cheerfulness. “No, nothing that I can think of.”
“Great!” Jack stood, grabbing his PDA off the desk. He was out of the room so fast that the floor might as well have been electrified, Owen not long after him, an autopsy sitting in the bay waiting for him to get on with.
Ianto drew himself stiffly to his feet, flashing her a brief smile on his way past as he left the room, and only Tosh paused on her way out, putting her hand on Gwen’s shoulder as she sat, staring at the spot where the blonde woman had been.
“You alright?” Tosh asked.
“Yeah,” Gwen said, trying to sound breezily unconcerned with things in general. “Just thinking hard. You know how much effort that takes.”
Tosh smiled, and, apparently believing her, left the room as well. It took several minutes before Gwen felt brave enough to take her eyes off the empty room and return to her desk.
**
Gwen successfully managed to forget about the strange visions, until just before midday, and she happened to glanced upwards.
On the gantry was the woman in the blue blouse, and the blonde woman stood next to her, leaning against the railings, shouting soundlessly and pointing at a blank spot on the floor. She looked quiet angry. But it was only a flash, and they were gone almost before Gwen registered that she’d seen anything. Even concentrating, she wasn’t certain she’d seen anything at all.
Gwen decided that she didn’t want to spend another moment sitting down here, deciding to get some fresh air. She went up to the tourist office, which was, surprisingly, empty. She was expecting Ianto to be there, considering that he wasn’t in the Hub, where he spent more of his time working these days. Gwen had long ago decided that the reason he had used to spend so much time in the office was partly a way of avoiding them, rather than over-attentiveness to his duties as Torchwood’s first line of defence. She’d noticed he tended to retreat to the public office whenever he wanted some time to work on his own.
“Ianto?” she called, pushing past the tacky beaded curtain to the back room, “You in here?”
He was, sitting at his desk, though his computer monitor, along with the light, was turned off. He had his elbows on the table and one hand over his eyes.
“You alright, sweetheart?” she asked, concerned.
“Headache,” Ianto answered, sounding a little hoarse. He dropped his hand from his eyes and looked towards her, but he squinted against the light, clearly uncomfortable. “Don’t get them very often.”
“Taken anything?”
He held up a blister pack of what looked to be paracetamol. Gwen nodded.
“Just a second,” she said, and hurried out of the room, heading back downstairs, thankfully not seeing anything strange on the way down. She returned after a few minutes, mug in hand, from which issued a wonderfully fruity smell. He was where she’d left him, looking equally as pained as before. “Tea,” she said, putting it down in front of him. “Herbal, no caffeine. It’s very soothing. Maybe you should drink less coffee, hmm?”
Ianto smiled wryly at her, though it was a weak expression at best, and sipped the tea, making a surprised sound of enjoyment. “The day I stop drinking coffee,” he said, after a moment, “Is the day this whole organisation grinds to a halt because I’m asleep under my desk up here.”
Gwen chuckled, and patted him on the shoulder. “You shouldn’t work so hard,” she chided, gently.
“Ah, but if I don’t, who will?” He didn’t seem to be shying away from the light as much now, looking directly at her instead of turning his head away from the light of the doorway. “Thank you, Gwen.” He raised his mug. “I mean it.” He wasn’t just thanking her for the tea.
“Do yell if you need anything,” she said, even though they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. If she hadn’t stumbled across him, she wouldn’t have ever known he was suffering. “Sometimes I wonder how this place ever got along without you.”
“I don't think they did,” Ianto took another sip of the tea. “You should have seen the mess when I arrived. Makes that time the Weevil's all came down with that digestive disorder to be neat and tidy.”
Gwen remembered that, and she abruptly had to fight off the wave of nausea that the memory prompted. She'd been sorely tempted to ask Jack for retcon at the time, to try and wipe the whole disgusting incident from her recollection, but she'd been too worried about the memories coming back at some unexpected moment, like while she was in bed with Rhys.
“Just, try to take it easy,” she said, “You should just ignore these things and hope they’ll get better.”
And that, she mused, as she headed back downstairs towards her desk, was probably advice she should try to take herself.
**
One of the first things that Gwen had been shown when she turned up for her first day of work at Torchwood was that under everyone’s desk was a large lever arch file, black with the Torchwood logo stamped on the spine, the word ‘Procedures’ scrawled on the label in thick permanent marker. Inside were dozens of pages of densely typed text, detailing what the course of action was for a given situation.
Some of them were mundane, like the file-tree structure used for storing reports on the server (which none of them used and which usually meant Ianto was the one tidying up the system after hours), or the method by which one applied for a leave of absence. Some of them were a little more esoteric, such as what to do if you were covered in alien bodily excretions of unknown composition (strip and into the sonic decon showers - the sonic ones because you never knew if water would interact badly with whatever you’d been covered with), or suffered from unavoidable C23-related dysmorphia (which Gwen had read three times before she realised with a start that it was referring to having your sex changed by unknown means).
In theory, they were all supposed to write up any procedures they came up with if there wasn’t one already in the folder, but in practice, it was usually Ianto who went around filing new pages into the folders after a crisis with an admonishment to “bloody read it this time”.
Gwen sat at her desk, absently twirling a pen in her fingers, and skimmed through the contents page, before she managed to find a likely looking heading and turned to the appropriate page.
Hallucinations, according to Procedure No. 133, which had apparently been written in the seventies and never updated, were something that every Torchwood employee should be cautious of.
‘You may find that you are suffering from inexplicable audio or visual events,’ it said, in neat courier font, ‘If you believe you are seeing unusual things, check whether your colleagues can see them as well. It may be all in your mind, or it may be an early sign of alien incursion.’
Gwen looked up from the folder and glanced about warily. The others were out to lunch, with Gwen pleading too much paperwork, and staying behind to keep an eye on the Rift monitors. In reality, she’d wanted some time alone to study the manuals without anyone asking her what she was doing.
Seeing no unusual apparitions, she returned to her reading.
‘It is possible, however,’ Procedure No. 133 continued, ‘that your perception of reality has been altered, and you may be unaware you are seeing things your colleagues are not. Ask your line manager about scheduling weekly meetings to compare versions of reality.’
Gwen could just imagine how that would go down with Owen. With a sigh, she closed the hefty folder and dropped it onto her desk. It landed with such a thud it made the keyboard jump.
It was foolish, she decided. She'd just been working too hard. Her imagination was starting to play tricks on her. What she needed, she also decided, was a cup of coffee - no, a cup of hot chocolate - and to sit down and enjoy her lunch break with a trashy non-work related book (she could raid Jack's office; she'd seen more than a few pulp novels lying around in there and she doubted Jack would object) and not worry about the weirdness that was Torchwood.
That decided, she got to her feet, and went to have a look in Jack's office, and see what he'd left to hand.
She crossed the threshold of the office, and leapt back, startled. A tall black man stood in her way, wearing ragged jeans and a tie-dyed t-shirt that was an obnoxious shade of orange except for the right shoulder, which was soaked in blood. The reason was fairly obvious. The right side of his skull was missing, brain matter clearly visible underneath jagged pieces of split skull, and his eye socket was empty. He was yelling silently, mouth working in an animated fashion that he shouldn’t have possessed, given how clearly he should have been incapable of even standing upright.
Finally, she gave into the urge she’d been restraining all along. She screamed.
**
“I’m seeing ghosts.”
Jack looked up from the letter he’d been writing to a UNIT commander, giving her an impassive look. “Of course you are,” he said, rolling the pen in his hands between his thumb and forefinger. He was the only person Gwen knew who used an old fashioned fountain pen to write official correspondence. His handwriting looked so neat, practically calligraphy, that she sometimes wondered how he’d learnt to write so perfectly. “Just to clarify, these aren’t like the ghost shifts are they?”
“Oh! No.” Gwen shook her head. She’d have said something a lot sooner if she’d been seeing the misty figures that had heralded the invasion she’d spent so long discounting as a mass hallucination. As it was, she'd gone and hidden in the toilets (her brain rationalising the action as hiding in a room with a door that locked) until the others had come back from lunch and she'd managed to drum up sufficient courage to go and talk to Jack. “No, I mean, actual ghosts. Here. In the Hub.”
Jack nodded, and looked a little relieved; he flashed a grin at her and set his pen down. “Well, that’s not surprising. That you’re seeing them, I mean. But they’re not ghosts.”
Gwen sat down heavily in the chair opposite him, relief that he wasn’t calling for Owen and a hypodermic needle full of sedative flooding through her and making her knees weak. “They’re not?”
Jack shook his head. “They’re as much ghosts as my coat is actual wool.” He gestured broadly to room, and the Hub at large. “See anyone now?”
Gwen glanced towards the window that separated the office from the main Hub, and jumped. She hadn’t been there a second ago, but the blonde woman was staring at her, pressed up against the glass. “Yes,” she said, warily. “A blonde woman, in a sort of tawny yellow Victorian outfit.”
A fond smile crossed Jack’s face, nostalgic recollection manifesting in his expression. “Ah, Emily,” he said, “Haven’t thought about the psychotic old bat in years. She died here, you know, in the Hub. A rogue energy-elemental electrocuted her. Anywhere on the planet other than the Hub, and she would have been safe, but this place had the right sort of power conduits to allow it to travel.”
Emily was mouthing something at her, glaring coldly at Gwen as she did so. Gwen tore her eyes away with difficulty. “But if she’s not a ghost…”
Jack leaned back in his chair, propping his elbows on the armrests and lacing his fingers before him. “You know that things, buildings, can hold a sort of, shall we say, psychic remnant,” he said, waiting for her to nod, recalling St. Teilo’s hospital, and the trouble it caused. “Strong emotions, especially, can stamp themselves on the fabric of reality.”
He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure what the exact mechanism behind it is. In the future, they’ll be a whole school of science devoted to psychotemperospatial mechanics. And hardly anyone’ll be able to spell it. But, basically, strong emotions affix themselves to reality. It’s not a ghost, it’s just an echo of a psychic event so strong as to change the fabric of space. More often than not, it’s been the death of the person who left the echo. They don’t manifest very often, just when the Rift is at a particularly strong ebb, and most people never see them. Apart from requiring a certain level of natural psychic ability, or training, the echoes seem to randomly align themselves to the quantum frequency of a person’s brain, so no one else will see them.”
“You’ve seen them?” She asked, curious.
Jack nodded. “Once or twice. Ianto’s seen them as well, gave him a fright his third day here. He dropped a tray full of mugs and got an earful from Suzie for breaking her favourite. London gave him a little psychic training, enough to shield from basic psychic influence, but not enough to actually understand what the result would be of developing an active sensitivity.” Jack rolled his eyes, as he often did when speaking of Torchwood London’s policies. No one ever really talked about the old London branch or what happened there, but Gwen had asked about it after the incident with Lisa, not understanding, and Toshiko had explained about London and Cardiff’s rocky relations with them, and had confided that Jack had severed all relations with the larger branch in such a dramatic fashion that Yvonne Hartman, the head of London, had despised him with a passion bordering on sheer hatred.
“Good job he charmed the Queen into letting Cardiff continue running with Crown funding,” she had murmured to Gwen over a hot chocolate in Starbucks, having been unwilling to discuss the subject in the Hub, where Ianto might hear them gossip about his past, and Lisa’s. “I would have paid to have seen how he managed it, though. All he would admit to is something unlikely involving the Corgis.”
Jack was still speaking, continuing his explanation.
“Toshiko and Owen have never seen them,” he said, “I was wondering if you would. Most people have a sort of latent psychic ability, and sometimes the Rift does strange things to the minds of Humans.”
He trailed off, staring somewhere over Gwen’s shoulder, and she resisted the urge to turn around and see if there was a ghost standing there.
“Anyway,” he finally, and abruptly, said, dismissing whatever thoughts had distracted him, “It just means that the Rift is being unusually active. If you ignore them, they’ll go away after a while. Don’t let it bother you, and if you like, you can go home for the next few days. There’s been a lot of strong emotion in the Hub, and I doubt there’s been as much in your house.” He paused and gave her a wicked grin. “Well, of the traumatic sort anyway.”
Gwen pretended to mock horror at Jack’s innuendo. “I think I might take you up on that,” she said, getting to her feet, wiping her palms on her jeans. Her hands had been sweating, sheer nerves getting the better of her. “It’s getting a little unnerving turning around and finding a woman yelling at me without making a sound.”
Jack frowned briefly. “Yelling at you? Do you know what she’s saying?”
Gwen shook her head. “No, ‘fraid not.”
Jack nodded waving her away. “Go enjoy some unexpected leave. I’m sure Rhys will appreciate it.”
Gwen started out the door, but halfway through it, she paused, leaning against the doorframe as she asked, in confusion, “Wait, what do you mean your coat isn’t wool?”
Jack grinned at her as he picked up his pen again. “Ask Ianto sometime. He’s just happy that he doesn’t have to spend our monthly budget on dry cleaning the damned thing.”
He waved her out, and she left. As she made her way towards the coat stand, she passed the woman in the blue blouse standing over the sofa, blood dripping down her front, weeping into her hands.
**
Gwen wouldn't have admitted it, but she was rather relieved at the prospect of walking out of the Hub and into the sunshine. Tosh commented on her abrupt cheeriness with a wry comment about them all being so cheerful to get half a day off, as she watched Gwen collect her coat and handbag.
“Alright for some,” Tosh groused, good-naturedly, “Some of us have to stay here and wonder about space-time rifts acting fussily.”
“Fussily?” Gwen repeated, amused at the description.
Tosh gestured at her monitors with her pen. They displayed line graphs that looked they’d been drawn by someone with an extremely unsteady hand jumping on a trampoline, in an earthquake. She sighed, annoyed with the Rift for being so reluctant to give up its secrets. “It always gets a bit bad this time of year, but this is worse than I’ve seen it since I started here.”
“Climate change,” Gwen said, promptly, and grinned Tosh’s surprise look. “Isn’t it all climate change these days?”
“Please, let us not have this discussion again,” Tosh said in mock-annoyance. “I don’t want Owen up here expounding on why conditions are perfect for mouldy pizza to evolve into a new form of intelligence thanks to ozone layer depletion.”
Gwen laughed. “You mock, but did you notice how Owen was suddenly clearing up a lot of the old pizza after that? Ianto was thrilled.”
Tosh smiled. “Some good things come of climate change then.”
Gwen shrugged into her jacket as she climbed the stairs, rather than taking the lift to the surface. She could use the exercise, and she was oddly reluctant to get trapped in a confined space, especially a confined space like the rickety old lift that had last seen servicing some fifteen odd years ago. She came out at the tourist office, rummaging in her pockets for her car keys.
Ianto was standing at the desk, holding a tourist board tea tray in his hands, and staring off vacantly into the middle distance.
“Ianto?”
He slammed the tray he was holding down on the desk. “I am ready, dammit!” He snapped the words, sounding tired and angry.
Gwen was brought up short, and scrabbled for a moment with what to say. “Uh… alright,” she said, cautiously, “Not what I was going to ask, but if you say so.”
Ianto looked up at her, and his fierce expression crumbled. He swiped a hand over his face, and suddenly looked extremely tired. “Sorry, Gwen, I… sorry. It’s just been a very long day.”
“Apparently so,” Gwen said, offering a sympathetic smile, “Jack been on your back about something?” As soon as she said the words, she bit her tongue and tried not to giggle. Really, she was no better than a schoolgirl if she was reading innuendo into such an innocent phrase.
“I mean is he pestering you?” she corrected, smoothly.
Ianto didn’t seem to hear the possible double meaning of her words, although he would normally, and even share a cheeky grin or maybe even a wink with her for her slip. His shoulders seemed stiff and tight, bunched up under his jacket. “No, no. Just... things, you know.”
He took a look at her with her coat on and asked, “Going on a mission?”
“I’m heading out for the day,” she said, “Jack gave me the afternoon off and I’ve a load of laundry calling my name.”
“I envy you,” Ianto said, sincerely, fingers of one hand rubbing his temple. He didn't seem to be aware he was doing it.
Gwen decided to distract him. “I was wondering,” She folded her arms and leaned against the desk, “Jack made a comment about his coat not being wool. What…?”
Ianto smiled, looking amused, and grateful for the mundane question. “Oh that. No, apparently it’s a thirty third century garment. Came through the Rift as a plain grey coat. You can set the design to whatever you like. It’s made of nanomesh fibres that self-seal if they’re broken. Saved a fortune on repair bills.”
Gwen knew she looked surprised. “It didn’t get filed away into the Archives?”
Ianto shook his head and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, it might have been originally. I think he had a coat he really liked and wanted a permanent replica of. There’s an entry in the files for a plain grey coat of unidentified nature, but if you look in the box, it’s empty. Odd that.”
Gwen laughed. “And he tells us we’re not to take alien kit out of the Hub.”
“Ah, but that’s Jack Harkness for you,” Ianto said, raising an eyebrow. “Exceptional in every sense of the word.”
“Careful you,” she said, “Or people’ll start to talk.”
She was rewarded with a slight laugh. She smiled, wishing that she could do more to cheer him up, but hoping she’d helped.
**
Rhys wasn’t at home when she got there, but then Gwen wasn’t expecting him to be. He was at work, earning his keep, he joked. He couldn’t rely on her to keep him in beer and twiglets, he would add, before Gwen would playfully shove him in the arm, and he’d pretend mortal injury.
The building in which their flat was located was quiet, most of its occupants away at work, and Gwen found the view of the lounge flooded with bright sunlight to be faintly surreal. She was so used to working unsociable hours underground that she so rarely saw her home during the day. Back when she worked at the police, and her shifts were more predictable, she’d put blackout curtains in the bedroom, so it was always dark even during the day.
She turned on the telly. It was typical daytime TV rubbish. Property shows competed against shows where people sold off their old knick-knacks, and were lined up along side insipid talkshows full of cackling women. All rubbish, yes, but pleasantly mind-numbing. Gwen found some melodramatic soap about Doctors and Nurses, and left it running in the background while she went to boil the kettle for some tea.
The distant chattering of the TV merged pleasantly with the street noise outside. It felt normal, Human, and Gwen was finding herself slowly unwinding, so when she bent into the fridge to grab the half-full bottle of milk she knew had been there this morning, she nearly leapt out of her skin and shrieked when she turned around to see the blonde woman, Emily, standing directly behind her. She dropped the milk bottle in her surprise. It didn’t smash on the kitchen floor, only spilled its contents in a rapidly expanding puddle of white. Gwen didn’t notice.
“No,” she whispered, shocked, “Jack said you were tied to the Hub.”
Emily didn’t look like she cared what Jack said. She stood, inches away from Gwen, shouting silently. She looked impatient, cross, and Gwen realised she was repeating the same phrase over and over. She stared at the woman’s lips, trying to work out what she was saying. Emily spoke silently, but suddenly enunciated her words slowly, exaggeratedly, as if aware that Gwen was trying to understand.
And then Gwen realised what those silent words were. She ran around the apparition, nearly slipping and falling on the spilt milk, and paused only to grab her car keys as she ran for the door.
What Emily had been repeating, over and over for days now, was: ‘He’s going to kill them all.’
**
According to the linkup to the Hub's mainframe that Gwen could access through her PDA, a simpler and more commercial-looking device than those Tosh tended to favour, there hadn't been anything to trigger the automated security sensors, and no emergency declared. So, while she rushed back to the Hub, she tried not to break the speed limits on her way there (although, apparently being a Torchwood officer gave her a permanent exemption from speeding fines). The tourist office was abandoned when she arrived, a sign saying “Out to Lunch” stuck on the exterior.
She practically ran downstairs, trying not to think which 'he' Emily might have been talking about.
She hurried through the cog door, glancing around anxiously. Nothing immediately leapt out at her as being dangerous or life threatening, and she briefly allowed herself to believe that what was going on was nothing but a figment of her own overactive imagination.
“Gwen?” Jack had been leaning against her desk, speaking to Owen, and when he noticed her entering, her straightened, giving her a smile that held a certain amount of confusion. “I thought you were heading home for the day.”
“Is everything alright here?” she asked, knowing that her voice betrayed her anxiety.
Jack had been leaning against Gwen’s desk, talking to Owen, and looked surprised as she walked in. “Everything’s fine,” he assured her, as she walked halfway around the tower, peering around and into one of the Hub’s myriad darkened corners. “Are you alright?”
Ianto emerged from the direction of the armoury, and wandered around with his tea tray, picking up old and used mugs.
“I’m fine,” Gwen said, “At least… at least I think.” She bit her lip nervously. “I saw… one of the ghosts… at my flat.”
Tosh leaned around her desk and frowned. “You’re seeing ghosts?” she asked, before her computer abruptly started trilling at her. She straightened and poked at her keyboard. “Hrm,” she said, “Interesting. The Rift’s entering some strange levels of activity-”
Gwen felt odd, like there was something pressing behind her eyes-
There was a crash as Ianto dropped the tray he'd been carrying, sending half-empty mugs of cold coffee flying. Some shattered on the hard concrete of the Hub's floor, the noise causing the Pterodactyl to start shrieking up in her nest. He staggered, catching himself on the railings with one hand, raising the other to his head and making a small pained sound.
“Ianto?” Jack frowned, concerned, and took a step towards Ianto, hand outstretched.
Gwen wasn't close enough to hear what he muttered, but when they reviewed the internal CCTV footage later, it would be clearly audible to the hi-spec microphones dotted around the Hub.
“I'm so sorry,” Ianto whispered, “But it's better this way.”
He took out his gun from the holster under his jacket, and shot Jack before he'd even taken three steps. Jack didn't even have time to look surprised, before he fell backwards, knocking into Gwen's desk and sending several folders tumbling to the ground. Gwen felt her eyes go wide, and she froze, heart pounding.
Then Ianto swung his arm towards Tosh, and he might have succeeded in shooting her as well, except she yelped and, in a display of finely honed reflexes, ducked behind her desk, the bullet embedding in the tiles of the wall behind her.
Gwen was stuck. She had nowhere to easily duck behind, caught out in the open and vulnerable. Owen had followed Toshiko's example, and was bent over Jack's body, even though there was nothing left for him to do, leaving Gwen to speak slowly, and calmly, hoping not to startle Ianto into shooting her as she had Jack.
“Ianto,” she said, in a low voice, “Why don't you put the gun down?”
Ianto didn't seem to notice her, turning backwards and forwards as if looking for a target, but not making any motion towards going behind the desks, hunting down those still alive, and he didn't swing his aim towards her as she spoke.
“It’s me,” she said, cautiously, walking slowly towards him, reaching out a cautious hand towards him. “Gwen, remember?”
Ianto finally seemed to react. He turned dull, unfocused, eyes towards her.
“Ianto, sweetheart, why don't you tell me what's going on?”
Ianto stared at her, but didn’t seem to be seeing her. “Susan,” he murmured, sounding heartbroken, “Should have gotten you away from all this. I’m so sorry.”
Behind her, Gwen heard Jack’s sharp intake of breath, but didn’t look at him to see him revive. “I’m not Susan,” she said, “I’m Gwen. Don’t you remember? I helped you decorate your flat after Jack left, because you said that you’d never spent so much time there, and it was the same empty shell that you’d moved into when you’d arrived.”
Ianto frowned, shaking his head a little as if trying to clear the cobwebs.
“Rhys came and helped on his day off,” she said, offering him a fond smile of remembrance, “He brought a six pack of beer and you drank it between you, and left none for me. He did the kitchen, and we had to redo it two days later because he’d done such a piss poor job.”
“I…” Ianto hesitated, and glance towards his left shoulder, looking at something unseen. Gwen was right next to him now, and could reach out, and touch his free hand-
And suddenly she could see it too. A man, sitting down on something fuzzy and hard to focus on, he was staring into the distance, and talking to himself. She couldn’t hear anything he was saying, but in time to his lips moving, Ianto spoke, giving the apparition a voice.
“It all changes,” he muttered, “It’s mercy. Better this way.”
Gwen felt herself trembling, desperation flooding through her. She didn’t know how to handle this. Maybe if Owen could get some sedative or something, they could drug Ianto into unconsciousness, and they could sort it out later. She was close enough to Ianto now that she could feel the warmth from his body, her right hand touching his left. She could try to wrestle the gun from him, but there was too great a chance that it would go off, and shoot one of them that wouldn’t come back to life, and Gwen’s heart quaked at the possibility.
And then she saw the woman in the blue blouse, blood dripping down from a terrible gunshot wound in her stomach. She was pale, presumably from her exsanguination, but she had a sad smile on her face. She looked, to Gwen, to be standing several feet away, behind Ianto, and she was staring at Gwen with piercing eyes.
She stood there, bleeding out, though her blood never touched the floor, mouth moving in speech, as silently as Emily’s had, but this time, somehow it made sense, as if Gwen’s mind just hadn’t put two and two together before, and now it was all clicking into place.
“It’s alright,” she murmured, in time with the woman, “We’re nothing. We’re echoes. The Rift made manifest for a heartbeat. You can let go.”
Ianto was silent for a moment, still looking at the man she could see out of the corner of his eye. But he tilted his head towards her. She could feel the breath on her cheek. “Susan,” he whispered.
“Alex,” she said, and felt a warmth suffuse her chest that was somehow alien, not her own. She’d been terrified a moment ago, worried for her friend and her team, and now she felt an abiding melancholy, tinged with affection, with… love?
Her body felt leaden, heavy and clumsy and yet her arm was moving raising to settle her left hand on Ianto's waist, and she couldn't remember ever deciding to make the move. In fact, it seemed like she was one step removed from the process of controlling her own body. She could still see the woman, Susan, out of her corner of her eye, still talking, and spoke with her.
“Don’t do it,” Susan whispered, through her. “Please don’t.”
Ianto twitched slightly, his voice becoming incoherent. “… when it all changes…”
“Shh,” she soothed, gently pulling him towards her.
He stiffened, frozen for a moment, then his arm, the one holding the gun, lowered, and wrapped around her shoulders, drawing her closer. “I’m…” he whispered, “I’m so…”
“Hush,” Gwen didn’t know if it was her speaking, or the ghost. The world had acquired an unreality to it all. “It’s alright.” She tilted her head upwards, driven by an unseen force, and he brought his head down to meet her.
His lips were warm, his touch firm and sure, and Gwen found that being kissed by Ianto Jones was rather pleasant. She mused that she could easily have had an inclination to see Ianto that way based solely on his skills. But he was her friend, not her lover, and she would have pulled away, except that alien feeling of warmth buoyed her, lending the kiss a fervour she didn't feel, and she was vaguely aware of the gun thudding to the floor, thankfully not firing, and Ianto's other arm coming up to wrap around her back, reaching up to the back of her neck.
Actually, this rather reminded her of the times where she'd wound up snogging someone while drunk at a party.
Ianto pulled back a moment, and breathed, “I'm sorry.”
“I know you are,” she told him, and kissed him again.
Tosh's computer chirruped. She raised her head enough to see the readings on the screens and addressed Owen and Jack sotto voce. “Rift activity's declining, returning to normal levels.”
Gwen only caught part of what Tosh said. Halfway through the sentence, she suddenly felt like a puppet with her strings cut, her legs crumbling under her own weight. She reflexively clutched at Ianto's jacket, but he was tumbling to the ground with her, and they both landed awkwardly, separating as they hit the floor. She felt more than she saw Ianto roll away and onto his back.
“My head,” he groaned, scrunching his eyes shut against even the dim lighting of the Hub. His voice lacked the agitated incoherence it had before. He just sounded tired now, and pained.
Gwen knew how he felt. There was an intense agony somewhere behind her eyes that made her want to curl into a ball, shielding her eyes from any light entering them at all. She nearly gave into the urge, when she felt her head being pillowed by something soft, and cool small hands brushing her hair away from her face. She opened her eyes to slits to see that Toshiko had pulled her head into her lap, while Jack was bent over Ianto, Owen examining their archivist first.
“The Rift energy's subsided,” she told Gwen, “I think you're ok.”
“Fantastic,” Gwen muttered, and wished someone would just kill her and put her out of her misery.
**
“Psychotemperospatial mechanics is a funny thing,” Jack said, stirring his coffee thoughtfully.
He sat on the sofa, in between Gwen on his right and Ianto on his left. Tosh and Owen sat opposite, looking vaguely confused, but attentive, still reeling from the unusual happenings of the day. On the other side of Jack, Gwen could see Ianto sitting right up against Jack, their arms and legs touching, though Ianto was acting as if he were sitting on his own, not a couple of hairs breadths away from sitting in Jack’s lap. In his hand he had one of Gwen’s herbal teas, foregoing the coffee the others were drinking.
Gwen was toying with the packet of industrial strength painkillers that Owen had made her take, feeling the pounding in her head starting to fade to a dull ache. She shoved the packet in her pocket with a sigh, and picked up her own mug.
“So those personalities,” Tosh said, carefully, sipping her drink, glancing between Ianto and Gwen, “Were they real?”
Jack shrugged. “How long is a piece of string? It depends on how you define real, I suppose. They were an emotional echo, given more… presence… if you like, by the Rift. Maybe they echoed onto Gwen and Ianto’s own personalities. Maybe it was how those two would act if they’d felt like that.”
Gwen stared into the surface of her rapidly cooling coffee and wondered if she were blushing.
“The unusual activity of the Rift,” Tosh said, working things through out loud, “Affected the echoes of the people who died here. The quantum signatures aligned to their brains and forced them into a psychic template.” She rapped her knuckle against the rim of her mug in thought. “Is there anyway to clean the Hub of those sorts of imprints?”
Jack thought about it and nodded. “Yes, but only if you found a powerfully psychic individual, and augmented them with some technology that doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth yet.”
Tosh nodded, slowly, looking resigned to the situation. She could allow herself to be calm. She’d never seen any of the ghosts.
“You knew them,” Owen said, staring at Jack, “Alex and Susan. Was that how they’d act? Or just how Gwen and Ianto’d act?”
“It was how they’d act,” Jack said, voice cracking, and he abruptly looked away. “Alex and Susan. God, I miss them. All of them,” he said, softly, sincerely, and none of them could think of a response to that.
Possibly they were thinking of the day when Jack would be missing them in turn. Gwen knew she was.
Abruptly, Jack shook his head, and donned a familiar grin, one Gwen was used to seeing when he was trying to diffuse and divert an issue. “So,” he said, glancing first at Ianto and then giving Gwen a definite leer. “That was hot, the two of you.” He gave her an elbow in the side. It was gentle though, little more than nudge. “If you ever fancy repeating that some night in my quarters, clothing optional, of course, you're more than welcome to.”
Owen threw his hands up. “Harkness, you are the bloody end!” He sounded utterly exasperated.
Ianto just smirked and rolled his eyes, and Gwen knew she was blushing furiously. Toshiko had an odd glint in her eye, and a half smile she tried to hide behind her coffee mug. Gwen could take a very good guess at what Tosh was thinking, and reminded herself that it was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for.
“What? Two very attractive people with glorious accents?” Jack grinned at Owen. “Tell me you wouldn't.”
“I think Rhys would object,” Gwen said, diplomatically.
“Invite him along too,” Jack said, “The more the merrier. Tosh and Owen can join in too. This place hasn't seen a good orgy in years.”
“You're completely incorrigible, Jack!” She cried, shoving him hard in the arm, knocking him into Ianto, who held up his mug to prevent the contents from spilling and gave Gwen a glare of mock-severity. Toshiko giggled, and made some sort of aside comment to Owen that had them both laughing, and Gwen felt that warmth in the pit of her stomach again, but this time it was all her own. It was the warmth she felt for these people, who were closer to her than her own family were in some ways, some of whom even managed to survive getting killed.
She refused to look in the direction where she'd seen Susan last, bleeding, weeping, dying, and pushed it out of her mind.
- End
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Belongs to the clever boffins at Auntie Beeb.
Summary: Gwen was used to seeing a lot of strange things since she'd started working at Torchwood, but even so, seeing an apparently dead woman across the table from her was a bit unusual.
Word Count: 7,880
The first time that Gwen saw the woman in the blue blouse, she almost managed to convince herself that she was just imagining things.
The team were all sitting in the conference room, ranged around the table with Jack at one end, Gwen at the other, and with the remainder of the group split along the long sides. The surface was covered in empty and discarded coffee mugs, files and bits of paper, and each of them had a PDA in front of them. Gwen had once asked why they still had so much paper when they all worked electronically, and was given such a confused stare that she’d never asked again.
Tosh was expounded on some details regarding the latest Rift activity. Gwen had instituted weekly summary meetings during what they euphemistically referred to as “Jack’s absence” (or what Owen liked to unkindly call ‘the time the rat bastard ran off and left us’). Jack may have just picked up information from any of them whenever he felt like it, but Gwen had found it far more helpful that they all got together once a week and made sure that they were on the same page, and it gave people a deadline to work at for reports and the like.
The first Monday morning after Jack had come back, he’d been rather surprised to find them all picking up their work and heading for the conference room out of habit, and when they all admitted they found the meetings useful (giving Gwen a brief moment of pride), Jack had shrugged and agreed and taken over them immediately, as he was rather wont to.
And then, right in the middle of Toshiko’s sentence, Gwen saw her. A woman sat next to Tosh, on a seat that wasn’t there. She wore a blue blouse, accessorised with a bullet wound in her stomach from which blood issued copiously, and she stared at Gwen with tears in her eyes. Gwen jumped slightly, startled and not a little shocked.
She blinked, and the woman was gone.
No, Gwen thought. Her vision must have blurred for a moment. Tosh was wearing a blue blouse, after all, and had the same dark hair. She knew she should never have watched that Hammer Horror marathon with Rhys last night. She had enough things to give her nightmares as it stood.
“Seasonal solar activity,” Tosh said, twisting her pen in her fingers. “Bane of my life back when I had to deal with satellite communications. Interferes with the linkups and there's nothing much you can do about it. Comms aren't a problem for us, but the effect it has on the Rift is bad enough.”
She tapped her PDA, and the screen changed to some interesting looking if incomprehensible diagrams, decorated with equations that might as well have been written in Russian for all Gwen understood them.
“Increased magnetism in the upper atmosphere means the Rift tends to get a little... hyperactive. We should expect the usual increase in bits of junk appearing, and hopefully we won't get a repeat of the flying spaghetti incident.”
Gwen gave Jack a sceptical look.
Jack gestured dismissively with the stylus of his own PDA, and looked slightly pained. “God, don't ask. Took a week to sort out, and I think we accidentally started a religion. It’s all in the reports.”
Gwen nodded, and decided that she didn’t really want to know. She’d decided that some things were best left not dwelt upon after reading about the Torchwood investigations into mysterious bovine pregnancies in Swansea back in the eighties.
Jack was already moving the meeting on. He tended to like the weekly overview meetings short and relatively painless, compared to the drawn out briefings that the Police had been starting to prefer by the time Gwen left them. Ianto had once confided that Torchwood one had been fond of monthly site meetings, complete with powerpoint presentations and corporate values. Gwen could find little that was more disturbing to contemplate, but she’d had to laugh when Ianto pointed out that he used to get through them by revisiting some of his dirtiest sexual fantasies. Gwen couldn’t remember what he’d said they were. They’d both been rather drunk at the time.
Briefly, she entertained the mental image of Jack standing at the front of the room in a business suit, using a laser pointer to gesture to slides and earnestly going on about the need for “Torchwood Values”. She tried not to giggle and draw attention to herself. Ianto, at least, didn’t look like he was thinking about fantasies during this meeting. He had his head propped on his fist, eyes cast down to the PDA sitting on the desk, looking tired more than anything.
Gwen wondered if she should make him take a day off, and pester Jack into doing his own damned paperwork for once. She’d been horrified at the amount of work he seemed to be doing when she’d taken over as leader (not knowing, of course, that it would only be a short term measure), and had occasionally been forced to drag him out, literally by the hand sometimes, to get him away from work.
Jack was asking about the overnight communications intercepts that Ianto sorted through and summarised for everyone on a daily basis. “Anything we need to be worried about?” he asked, and Gwen forced her mind to stop wandering and focus on the meeting at hand.
Ianto was frowning, rubbing his forehead, but dropped his hand when Jack addressed him. “Nothing much beyond the usual chatter,” he said, poking listlessly at his screen with the stylus in his hand. “There are a few calls we can attribute to new Weevil sightings, but harmless ones, it seems; people catching sight of Weevils when they come above ground to move between sewer lines. Government and military are fairly quiet, although I did pick up a UNIT transmission. Apparently their sub-orbital carrier, the, uh…” He scrolled through his PDA, looking for the name.
“Valiant,” Jack supplied, tersely.
Gwen frowned slightly. Ianto really should have known that already. She knew it. She guessed he was a little distracted, definitely tired.
Ianto nodded. “That’s the one. It’ll be making a pass overhead, en route to Russian airspace, at fourteen twenty two.”
Tosh was already making notes. “I’ll make sure that the Hub’s in low power mode so that we don’t put out any spikes to make them curious.”
“Again,” Owen said sourly, and at Jack’s surprised and slightly confused look, shook his head. “Long and unpleasant story. Happened while you weren’t here,” Owen added, pointedly.
Jack at least had the grace not to pursue the issue, instead clearing his throat and looking at his personal screen. “Anything else?”
Gwen raised her eyes, opening her mouth to speak, but froze as she did so, staring over Jack’s shoulder. Behind him was a severe looking blonde woman. Unlike the previous apparition, there was no sign of mortal wound, but the woman stood, hands on her hip apparently yelling at Gwen, though no sound came from her. She was utterly silent, and Gwen found that she was briefly locked in place, with no idea what to say or do. No one else seemed to have noticed the woman, so surely she should say something.
“Gwen?” Jack drew her attention, and in the time it took to blink, the woman was gone.
“Yes?” she said, her voice cracking slightly.
Jack looked at her. “Anything else?”
“No,” she said quickly, then cleared her throat, and forced cheerfulness. “No, nothing that I can think of.”
“Great!” Jack stood, grabbing his PDA off the desk. He was out of the room so fast that the floor might as well have been electrified, Owen not long after him, an autopsy sitting in the bay waiting for him to get on with.
Ianto drew himself stiffly to his feet, flashing her a brief smile on his way past as he left the room, and only Tosh paused on her way out, putting her hand on Gwen’s shoulder as she sat, staring at the spot where the blonde woman had been.
“You alright?” Tosh asked.
“Yeah,” Gwen said, trying to sound breezily unconcerned with things in general. “Just thinking hard. You know how much effort that takes.”
Tosh smiled, and, apparently believing her, left the room as well. It took several minutes before Gwen felt brave enough to take her eyes off the empty room and return to her desk.
**
Gwen successfully managed to forget about the strange visions, until just before midday, and she happened to glanced upwards.
On the gantry was the woman in the blue blouse, and the blonde woman stood next to her, leaning against the railings, shouting soundlessly and pointing at a blank spot on the floor. She looked quiet angry. But it was only a flash, and they were gone almost before Gwen registered that she’d seen anything. Even concentrating, she wasn’t certain she’d seen anything at all.
Gwen decided that she didn’t want to spend another moment sitting down here, deciding to get some fresh air. She went up to the tourist office, which was, surprisingly, empty. She was expecting Ianto to be there, considering that he wasn’t in the Hub, where he spent more of his time working these days. Gwen had long ago decided that the reason he had used to spend so much time in the office was partly a way of avoiding them, rather than over-attentiveness to his duties as Torchwood’s first line of defence. She’d noticed he tended to retreat to the public office whenever he wanted some time to work on his own.
“Ianto?” she called, pushing past the tacky beaded curtain to the back room, “You in here?”
He was, sitting at his desk, though his computer monitor, along with the light, was turned off. He had his elbows on the table and one hand over his eyes.
“You alright, sweetheart?” she asked, concerned.
“Headache,” Ianto answered, sounding a little hoarse. He dropped his hand from his eyes and looked towards her, but he squinted against the light, clearly uncomfortable. “Don’t get them very often.”
“Taken anything?”
He held up a blister pack of what looked to be paracetamol. Gwen nodded.
“Just a second,” she said, and hurried out of the room, heading back downstairs, thankfully not seeing anything strange on the way down. She returned after a few minutes, mug in hand, from which issued a wonderfully fruity smell. He was where she’d left him, looking equally as pained as before. “Tea,” she said, putting it down in front of him. “Herbal, no caffeine. It’s very soothing. Maybe you should drink less coffee, hmm?”
Ianto smiled wryly at her, though it was a weak expression at best, and sipped the tea, making a surprised sound of enjoyment. “The day I stop drinking coffee,” he said, after a moment, “Is the day this whole organisation grinds to a halt because I’m asleep under my desk up here.”
Gwen chuckled, and patted him on the shoulder. “You shouldn’t work so hard,” she chided, gently.
“Ah, but if I don’t, who will?” He didn’t seem to be shying away from the light as much now, looking directly at her instead of turning his head away from the light of the doorway. “Thank you, Gwen.” He raised his mug. “I mean it.” He wasn’t just thanking her for the tea.
“Do yell if you need anything,” she said, even though they both knew that wasn’t going to happen. If she hadn’t stumbled across him, she wouldn’t have ever known he was suffering. “Sometimes I wonder how this place ever got along without you.”
“I don't think they did,” Ianto took another sip of the tea. “You should have seen the mess when I arrived. Makes that time the Weevil's all came down with that digestive disorder to be neat and tidy.”
Gwen remembered that, and she abruptly had to fight off the wave of nausea that the memory prompted. She'd been sorely tempted to ask Jack for retcon at the time, to try and wipe the whole disgusting incident from her recollection, but she'd been too worried about the memories coming back at some unexpected moment, like while she was in bed with Rhys.
“Just, try to take it easy,” she said, “You should just ignore these things and hope they’ll get better.”
And that, she mused, as she headed back downstairs towards her desk, was probably advice she should try to take herself.
**
One of the first things that Gwen had been shown when she turned up for her first day of work at Torchwood was that under everyone’s desk was a large lever arch file, black with the Torchwood logo stamped on the spine, the word ‘Procedures’ scrawled on the label in thick permanent marker. Inside were dozens of pages of densely typed text, detailing what the course of action was for a given situation.
Some of them were mundane, like the file-tree structure used for storing reports on the server (which none of them used and which usually meant Ianto was the one tidying up the system after hours), or the method by which one applied for a leave of absence. Some of them were a little more esoteric, such as what to do if you were covered in alien bodily excretions of unknown composition (strip and into the sonic decon showers - the sonic ones because you never knew if water would interact badly with whatever you’d been covered with), or suffered from unavoidable C23-related dysmorphia (which Gwen had read three times before she realised with a start that it was referring to having your sex changed by unknown means).
In theory, they were all supposed to write up any procedures they came up with if there wasn’t one already in the folder, but in practice, it was usually Ianto who went around filing new pages into the folders after a crisis with an admonishment to “bloody read it this time”.
Gwen sat at her desk, absently twirling a pen in her fingers, and skimmed through the contents page, before she managed to find a likely looking heading and turned to the appropriate page.
Hallucinations, according to Procedure No. 133, which had apparently been written in the seventies and never updated, were something that every Torchwood employee should be cautious of.
‘You may find that you are suffering from inexplicable audio or visual events,’ it said, in neat courier font, ‘If you believe you are seeing unusual things, check whether your colleagues can see them as well. It may be all in your mind, or it may be an early sign of alien incursion.’
Gwen looked up from the folder and glanced about warily. The others were out to lunch, with Gwen pleading too much paperwork, and staying behind to keep an eye on the Rift monitors. In reality, she’d wanted some time alone to study the manuals without anyone asking her what she was doing.
Seeing no unusual apparitions, she returned to her reading.
‘It is possible, however,’ Procedure No. 133 continued, ‘that your perception of reality has been altered, and you may be unaware you are seeing things your colleagues are not. Ask your line manager about scheduling weekly meetings to compare versions of reality.’
Gwen could just imagine how that would go down with Owen. With a sigh, she closed the hefty folder and dropped it onto her desk. It landed with such a thud it made the keyboard jump.
It was foolish, she decided. She'd just been working too hard. Her imagination was starting to play tricks on her. What she needed, she also decided, was a cup of coffee - no, a cup of hot chocolate - and to sit down and enjoy her lunch break with a trashy non-work related book (she could raid Jack's office; she'd seen more than a few pulp novels lying around in there and she doubted Jack would object) and not worry about the weirdness that was Torchwood.
That decided, she got to her feet, and went to have a look in Jack's office, and see what he'd left to hand.
She crossed the threshold of the office, and leapt back, startled. A tall black man stood in her way, wearing ragged jeans and a tie-dyed t-shirt that was an obnoxious shade of orange except for the right shoulder, which was soaked in blood. The reason was fairly obvious. The right side of his skull was missing, brain matter clearly visible underneath jagged pieces of split skull, and his eye socket was empty. He was yelling silently, mouth working in an animated fashion that he shouldn’t have possessed, given how clearly he should have been incapable of even standing upright.
Finally, she gave into the urge she’d been restraining all along. She screamed.
**
“I’m seeing ghosts.”
Jack looked up from the letter he’d been writing to a UNIT commander, giving her an impassive look. “Of course you are,” he said, rolling the pen in his hands between his thumb and forefinger. He was the only person Gwen knew who used an old fashioned fountain pen to write official correspondence. His handwriting looked so neat, practically calligraphy, that she sometimes wondered how he’d learnt to write so perfectly. “Just to clarify, these aren’t like the ghost shifts are they?”
“Oh! No.” Gwen shook her head. She’d have said something a lot sooner if she’d been seeing the misty figures that had heralded the invasion she’d spent so long discounting as a mass hallucination. As it was, she'd gone and hidden in the toilets (her brain rationalising the action as hiding in a room with a door that locked) until the others had come back from lunch and she'd managed to drum up sufficient courage to go and talk to Jack. “No, I mean, actual ghosts. Here. In the Hub.”
Jack nodded, and looked a little relieved; he flashed a grin at her and set his pen down. “Well, that’s not surprising. That you’re seeing them, I mean. But they’re not ghosts.”
Gwen sat down heavily in the chair opposite him, relief that he wasn’t calling for Owen and a hypodermic needle full of sedative flooding through her and making her knees weak. “They’re not?”
Jack shook his head. “They’re as much ghosts as my coat is actual wool.” He gestured broadly to room, and the Hub at large. “See anyone now?”
Gwen glanced towards the window that separated the office from the main Hub, and jumped. She hadn’t been there a second ago, but the blonde woman was staring at her, pressed up against the glass. “Yes,” she said, warily. “A blonde woman, in a sort of tawny yellow Victorian outfit.”
A fond smile crossed Jack’s face, nostalgic recollection manifesting in his expression. “Ah, Emily,” he said, “Haven’t thought about the psychotic old bat in years. She died here, you know, in the Hub. A rogue energy-elemental electrocuted her. Anywhere on the planet other than the Hub, and she would have been safe, but this place had the right sort of power conduits to allow it to travel.”
Emily was mouthing something at her, glaring coldly at Gwen as she did so. Gwen tore her eyes away with difficulty. “But if she’s not a ghost…”
Jack leaned back in his chair, propping his elbows on the armrests and lacing his fingers before him. “You know that things, buildings, can hold a sort of, shall we say, psychic remnant,” he said, waiting for her to nod, recalling St. Teilo’s hospital, and the trouble it caused. “Strong emotions, especially, can stamp themselves on the fabric of reality.”
He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure what the exact mechanism behind it is. In the future, they’ll be a whole school of science devoted to psychotemperospatial mechanics. And hardly anyone’ll be able to spell it. But, basically, strong emotions affix themselves to reality. It’s not a ghost, it’s just an echo of a psychic event so strong as to change the fabric of space. More often than not, it’s been the death of the person who left the echo. They don’t manifest very often, just when the Rift is at a particularly strong ebb, and most people never see them. Apart from requiring a certain level of natural psychic ability, or training, the echoes seem to randomly align themselves to the quantum frequency of a person’s brain, so no one else will see them.”
“You’ve seen them?” She asked, curious.
Jack nodded. “Once or twice. Ianto’s seen them as well, gave him a fright his third day here. He dropped a tray full of mugs and got an earful from Suzie for breaking her favourite. London gave him a little psychic training, enough to shield from basic psychic influence, but not enough to actually understand what the result would be of developing an active sensitivity.” Jack rolled his eyes, as he often did when speaking of Torchwood London’s policies. No one ever really talked about the old London branch or what happened there, but Gwen had asked about it after the incident with Lisa, not understanding, and Toshiko had explained about London and Cardiff’s rocky relations with them, and had confided that Jack had severed all relations with the larger branch in such a dramatic fashion that Yvonne Hartman, the head of London, had despised him with a passion bordering on sheer hatred.
“Good job he charmed the Queen into letting Cardiff continue running with Crown funding,” she had murmured to Gwen over a hot chocolate in Starbucks, having been unwilling to discuss the subject in the Hub, where Ianto might hear them gossip about his past, and Lisa’s. “I would have paid to have seen how he managed it, though. All he would admit to is something unlikely involving the Corgis.”
Jack was still speaking, continuing his explanation.
“Toshiko and Owen have never seen them,” he said, “I was wondering if you would. Most people have a sort of latent psychic ability, and sometimes the Rift does strange things to the minds of Humans.”
He trailed off, staring somewhere over Gwen’s shoulder, and she resisted the urge to turn around and see if there was a ghost standing there.
“Anyway,” he finally, and abruptly, said, dismissing whatever thoughts had distracted him, “It just means that the Rift is being unusually active. If you ignore them, they’ll go away after a while. Don’t let it bother you, and if you like, you can go home for the next few days. There’s been a lot of strong emotion in the Hub, and I doubt there’s been as much in your house.” He paused and gave her a wicked grin. “Well, of the traumatic sort anyway.”
Gwen pretended to mock horror at Jack’s innuendo. “I think I might take you up on that,” she said, getting to her feet, wiping her palms on her jeans. Her hands had been sweating, sheer nerves getting the better of her. “It’s getting a little unnerving turning around and finding a woman yelling at me without making a sound.”
Jack frowned briefly. “Yelling at you? Do you know what she’s saying?”
Gwen shook her head. “No, ‘fraid not.”
Jack nodded waving her away. “Go enjoy some unexpected leave. I’m sure Rhys will appreciate it.”
Gwen started out the door, but halfway through it, she paused, leaning against the doorframe as she asked, in confusion, “Wait, what do you mean your coat isn’t wool?”
Jack grinned at her as he picked up his pen again. “Ask Ianto sometime. He’s just happy that he doesn’t have to spend our monthly budget on dry cleaning the damned thing.”
He waved her out, and she left. As she made her way towards the coat stand, she passed the woman in the blue blouse standing over the sofa, blood dripping down her front, weeping into her hands.
**
Gwen wouldn't have admitted it, but she was rather relieved at the prospect of walking out of the Hub and into the sunshine. Tosh commented on her abrupt cheeriness with a wry comment about them all being so cheerful to get half a day off, as she watched Gwen collect her coat and handbag.
“Alright for some,” Tosh groused, good-naturedly, “Some of us have to stay here and wonder about space-time rifts acting fussily.”
“Fussily?” Gwen repeated, amused at the description.
Tosh gestured at her monitors with her pen. They displayed line graphs that looked they’d been drawn by someone with an extremely unsteady hand jumping on a trampoline, in an earthquake. She sighed, annoyed with the Rift for being so reluctant to give up its secrets. “It always gets a bit bad this time of year, but this is worse than I’ve seen it since I started here.”
“Climate change,” Gwen said, promptly, and grinned Tosh’s surprise look. “Isn’t it all climate change these days?”
“Please, let us not have this discussion again,” Tosh said in mock-annoyance. “I don’t want Owen up here expounding on why conditions are perfect for mouldy pizza to evolve into a new form of intelligence thanks to ozone layer depletion.”
Gwen laughed. “You mock, but did you notice how Owen was suddenly clearing up a lot of the old pizza after that? Ianto was thrilled.”
Tosh smiled. “Some good things come of climate change then.”
Gwen shrugged into her jacket as she climbed the stairs, rather than taking the lift to the surface. She could use the exercise, and she was oddly reluctant to get trapped in a confined space, especially a confined space like the rickety old lift that had last seen servicing some fifteen odd years ago. She came out at the tourist office, rummaging in her pockets for her car keys.
Ianto was standing at the desk, holding a tourist board tea tray in his hands, and staring off vacantly into the middle distance.
“Ianto?”
He slammed the tray he was holding down on the desk. “I am ready, dammit!” He snapped the words, sounding tired and angry.
Gwen was brought up short, and scrabbled for a moment with what to say. “Uh… alright,” she said, cautiously, “Not what I was going to ask, but if you say so.”
Ianto looked up at her, and his fierce expression crumbled. He swiped a hand over his face, and suddenly looked extremely tired. “Sorry, Gwen, I… sorry. It’s just been a very long day.”
“Apparently so,” Gwen said, offering a sympathetic smile, “Jack been on your back about something?” As soon as she said the words, she bit her tongue and tried not to giggle. Really, she was no better than a schoolgirl if she was reading innuendo into such an innocent phrase.
“I mean is he pestering you?” she corrected, smoothly.
Ianto didn’t seem to hear the possible double meaning of her words, although he would normally, and even share a cheeky grin or maybe even a wink with her for her slip. His shoulders seemed stiff and tight, bunched up under his jacket. “No, no. Just... things, you know.”
He took a look at her with her coat on and asked, “Going on a mission?”
“I’m heading out for the day,” she said, “Jack gave me the afternoon off and I’ve a load of laundry calling my name.”
“I envy you,” Ianto said, sincerely, fingers of one hand rubbing his temple. He didn't seem to be aware he was doing it.
Gwen decided to distract him. “I was wondering,” She folded her arms and leaned against the desk, “Jack made a comment about his coat not being wool. What…?”
Ianto smiled, looking amused, and grateful for the mundane question. “Oh that. No, apparently it’s a thirty third century garment. Came through the Rift as a plain grey coat. You can set the design to whatever you like. It’s made of nanomesh fibres that self-seal if they’re broken. Saved a fortune on repair bills.”
Gwen knew she looked surprised. “It didn’t get filed away into the Archives?”
Ianto shook his head and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, it might have been originally. I think he had a coat he really liked and wanted a permanent replica of. There’s an entry in the files for a plain grey coat of unidentified nature, but if you look in the box, it’s empty. Odd that.”
Gwen laughed. “And he tells us we’re not to take alien kit out of the Hub.”
“Ah, but that’s Jack Harkness for you,” Ianto said, raising an eyebrow. “Exceptional in every sense of the word.”
“Careful you,” she said, “Or people’ll start to talk.”
She was rewarded with a slight laugh. She smiled, wishing that she could do more to cheer him up, but hoping she’d helped.
**
Rhys wasn’t at home when she got there, but then Gwen wasn’t expecting him to be. He was at work, earning his keep, he joked. He couldn’t rely on her to keep him in beer and twiglets, he would add, before Gwen would playfully shove him in the arm, and he’d pretend mortal injury.
The building in which their flat was located was quiet, most of its occupants away at work, and Gwen found the view of the lounge flooded with bright sunlight to be faintly surreal. She was so used to working unsociable hours underground that she so rarely saw her home during the day. Back when she worked at the police, and her shifts were more predictable, she’d put blackout curtains in the bedroom, so it was always dark even during the day.
She turned on the telly. It was typical daytime TV rubbish. Property shows competed against shows where people sold off their old knick-knacks, and were lined up along side insipid talkshows full of cackling women. All rubbish, yes, but pleasantly mind-numbing. Gwen found some melodramatic soap about Doctors and Nurses, and left it running in the background while she went to boil the kettle for some tea.
The distant chattering of the TV merged pleasantly with the street noise outside. It felt normal, Human, and Gwen was finding herself slowly unwinding, so when she bent into the fridge to grab the half-full bottle of milk she knew had been there this morning, she nearly leapt out of her skin and shrieked when she turned around to see the blonde woman, Emily, standing directly behind her. She dropped the milk bottle in her surprise. It didn’t smash on the kitchen floor, only spilled its contents in a rapidly expanding puddle of white. Gwen didn’t notice.
“No,” she whispered, shocked, “Jack said you were tied to the Hub.”
Emily didn’t look like she cared what Jack said. She stood, inches away from Gwen, shouting silently. She looked impatient, cross, and Gwen realised she was repeating the same phrase over and over. She stared at the woman’s lips, trying to work out what she was saying. Emily spoke silently, but suddenly enunciated her words slowly, exaggeratedly, as if aware that Gwen was trying to understand.
And then Gwen realised what those silent words were. She ran around the apparition, nearly slipping and falling on the spilt milk, and paused only to grab her car keys as she ran for the door.
What Emily had been repeating, over and over for days now, was: ‘He’s going to kill them all.’
**
According to the linkup to the Hub's mainframe that Gwen could access through her PDA, a simpler and more commercial-looking device than those Tosh tended to favour, there hadn't been anything to trigger the automated security sensors, and no emergency declared. So, while she rushed back to the Hub, she tried not to break the speed limits on her way there (although, apparently being a Torchwood officer gave her a permanent exemption from speeding fines). The tourist office was abandoned when she arrived, a sign saying “Out to Lunch” stuck on the exterior.
She practically ran downstairs, trying not to think which 'he' Emily might have been talking about.
She hurried through the cog door, glancing around anxiously. Nothing immediately leapt out at her as being dangerous or life threatening, and she briefly allowed herself to believe that what was going on was nothing but a figment of her own overactive imagination.
“Gwen?” Jack had been leaning against her desk, speaking to Owen, and when he noticed her entering, her straightened, giving her a smile that held a certain amount of confusion. “I thought you were heading home for the day.”
“Is everything alright here?” she asked, knowing that her voice betrayed her anxiety.
Jack had been leaning against Gwen’s desk, talking to Owen, and looked surprised as she walked in. “Everything’s fine,” he assured her, as she walked halfway around the tower, peering around and into one of the Hub’s myriad darkened corners. “Are you alright?”
Ianto emerged from the direction of the armoury, and wandered around with his tea tray, picking up old and used mugs.
“I’m fine,” Gwen said, “At least… at least I think.” She bit her lip nervously. “I saw… one of the ghosts… at my flat.”
Tosh leaned around her desk and frowned. “You’re seeing ghosts?” she asked, before her computer abruptly started trilling at her. She straightened and poked at her keyboard. “Hrm,” she said, “Interesting. The Rift’s entering some strange levels of activity-”
Gwen felt odd, like there was something pressing behind her eyes-
There was a crash as Ianto dropped the tray he'd been carrying, sending half-empty mugs of cold coffee flying. Some shattered on the hard concrete of the Hub's floor, the noise causing the Pterodactyl to start shrieking up in her nest. He staggered, catching himself on the railings with one hand, raising the other to his head and making a small pained sound.
“Ianto?” Jack frowned, concerned, and took a step towards Ianto, hand outstretched.
Gwen wasn't close enough to hear what he muttered, but when they reviewed the internal CCTV footage later, it would be clearly audible to the hi-spec microphones dotted around the Hub.
“I'm so sorry,” Ianto whispered, “But it's better this way.”
He took out his gun from the holster under his jacket, and shot Jack before he'd even taken three steps. Jack didn't even have time to look surprised, before he fell backwards, knocking into Gwen's desk and sending several folders tumbling to the ground. Gwen felt her eyes go wide, and she froze, heart pounding.
Then Ianto swung his arm towards Tosh, and he might have succeeded in shooting her as well, except she yelped and, in a display of finely honed reflexes, ducked behind her desk, the bullet embedding in the tiles of the wall behind her.
Gwen was stuck. She had nowhere to easily duck behind, caught out in the open and vulnerable. Owen had followed Toshiko's example, and was bent over Jack's body, even though there was nothing left for him to do, leaving Gwen to speak slowly, and calmly, hoping not to startle Ianto into shooting her as she had Jack.
“Ianto,” she said, in a low voice, “Why don't you put the gun down?”
Ianto didn't seem to notice her, turning backwards and forwards as if looking for a target, but not making any motion towards going behind the desks, hunting down those still alive, and he didn't swing his aim towards her as she spoke.
“It’s me,” she said, cautiously, walking slowly towards him, reaching out a cautious hand towards him. “Gwen, remember?”
Ianto finally seemed to react. He turned dull, unfocused, eyes towards her.
“Ianto, sweetheart, why don't you tell me what's going on?”
Ianto stared at her, but didn’t seem to be seeing her. “Susan,” he murmured, sounding heartbroken, “Should have gotten you away from all this. I’m so sorry.”
Behind her, Gwen heard Jack’s sharp intake of breath, but didn’t look at him to see him revive. “I’m not Susan,” she said, “I’m Gwen. Don’t you remember? I helped you decorate your flat after Jack left, because you said that you’d never spent so much time there, and it was the same empty shell that you’d moved into when you’d arrived.”
Ianto frowned, shaking his head a little as if trying to clear the cobwebs.
“Rhys came and helped on his day off,” she said, offering him a fond smile of remembrance, “He brought a six pack of beer and you drank it between you, and left none for me. He did the kitchen, and we had to redo it two days later because he’d done such a piss poor job.”
“I…” Ianto hesitated, and glance towards his left shoulder, looking at something unseen. Gwen was right next to him now, and could reach out, and touch his free hand-
And suddenly she could see it too. A man, sitting down on something fuzzy and hard to focus on, he was staring into the distance, and talking to himself. She couldn’t hear anything he was saying, but in time to his lips moving, Ianto spoke, giving the apparition a voice.
“It all changes,” he muttered, “It’s mercy. Better this way.”
Gwen felt herself trembling, desperation flooding through her. She didn’t know how to handle this. Maybe if Owen could get some sedative or something, they could drug Ianto into unconsciousness, and they could sort it out later. She was close enough to Ianto now that she could feel the warmth from his body, her right hand touching his left. She could try to wrestle the gun from him, but there was too great a chance that it would go off, and shoot one of them that wouldn’t come back to life, and Gwen’s heart quaked at the possibility.
And then she saw the woman in the blue blouse, blood dripping down from a terrible gunshot wound in her stomach. She was pale, presumably from her exsanguination, but she had a sad smile on her face. She looked, to Gwen, to be standing several feet away, behind Ianto, and she was staring at Gwen with piercing eyes.
She stood there, bleeding out, though her blood never touched the floor, mouth moving in speech, as silently as Emily’s had, but this time, somehow it made sense, as if Gwen’s mind just hadn’t put two and two together before, and now it was all clicking into place.
“It’s alright,” she murmured, in time with the woman, “We’re nothing. We’re echoes. The Rift made manifest for a heartbeat. You can let go.”
Ianto was silent for a moment, still looking at the man she could see out of the corner of his eye. But he tilted his head towards her. She could feel the breath on her cheek. “Susan,” he whispered.
“Alex,” she said, and felt a warmth suffuse her chest that was somehow alien, not her own. She’d been terrified a moment ago, worried for her friend and her team, and now she felt an abiding melancholy, tinged with affection, with… love?
Her body felt leaden, heavy and clumsy and yet her arm was moving raising to settle her left hand on Ianto's waist, and she couldn't remember ever deciding to make the move. In fact, it seemed like she was one step removed from the process of controlling her own body. She could still see the woman, Susan, out of her corner of her eye, still talking, and spoke with her.
“Don’t do it,” Susan whispered, through her. “Please don’t.”
Ianto twitched slightly, his voice becoming incoherent. “… when it all changes…”
“Shh,” she soothed, gently pulling him towards her.
He stiffened, frozen for a moment, then his arm, the one holding the gun, lowered, and wrapped around her shoulders, drawing her closer. “I’m…” he whispered, “I’m so…”
“Hush,” Gwen didn’t know if it was her speaking, or the ghost. The world had acquired an unreality to it all. “It’s alright.” She tilted her head upwards, driven by an unseen force, and he brought his head down to meet her.
His lips were warm, his touch firm and sure, and Gwen found that being kissed by Ianto Jones was rather pleasant. She mused that she could easily have had an inclination to see Ianto that way based solely on his skills. But he was her friend, not her lover, and she would have pulled away, except that alien feeling of warmth buoyed her, lending the kiss a fervour she didn't feel, and she was vaguely aware of the gun thudding to the floor, thankfully not firing, and Ianto's other arm coming up to wrap around her back, reaching up to the back of her neck.
Actually, this rather reminded her of the times where she'd wound up snogging someone while drunk at a party.
Ianto pulled back a moment, and breathed, “I'm sorry.”
“I know you are,” she told him, and kissed him again.
Tosh's computer chirruped. She raised her head enough to see the readings on the screens and addressed Owen and Jack sotto voce. “Rift activity's declining, returning to normal levels.”
Gwen only caught part of what Tosh said. Halfway through the sentence, she suddenly felt like a puppet with her strings cut, her legs crumbling under her own weight. She reflexively clutched at Ianto's jacket, but he was tumbling to the ground with her, and they both landed awkwardly, separating as they hit the floor. She felt more than she saw Ianto roll away and onto his back.
“My head,” he groaned, scrunching his eyes shut against even the dim lighting of the Hub. His voice lacked the agitated incoherence it had before. He just sounded tired now, and pained.
Gwen knew how he felt. There was an intense agony somewhere behind her eyes that made her want to curl into a ball, shielding her eyes from any light entering them at all. She nearly gave into the urge, when she felt her head being pillowed by something soft, and cool small hands brushing her hair away from her face. She opened her eyes to slits to see that Toshiko had pulled her head into her lap, while Jack was bent over Ianto, Owen examining their archivist first.
“The Rift energy's subsided,” she told Gwen, “I think you're ok.”
“Fantastic,” Gwen muttered, and wished someone would just kill her and put her out of her misery.
**
“Psychotemperospatial mechanics is a funny thing,” Jack said, stirring his coffee thoughtfully.
He sat on the sofa, in between Gwen on his right and Ianto on his left. Tosh and Owen sat opposite, looking vaguely confused, but attentive, still reeling from the unusual happenings of the day. On the other side of Jack, Gwen could see Ianto sitting right up against Jack, their arms and legs touching, though Ianto was acting as if he were sitting on his own, not a couple of hairs breadths away from sitting in Jack’s lap. In his hand he had one of Gwen’s herbal teas, foregoing the coffee the others were drinking.
Gwen was toying with the packet of industrial strength painkillers that Owen had made her take, feeling the pounding in her head starting to fade to a dull ache. She shoved the packet in her pocket with a sigh, and picked up her own mug.
“So those personalities,” Tosh said, carefully, sipping her drink, glancing between Ianto and Gwen, “Were they real?”
Jack shrugged. “How long is a piece of string? It depends on how you define real, I suppose. They were an emotional echo, given more… presence… if you like, by the Rift. Maybe they echoed onto Gwen and Ianto’s own personalities. Maybe it was how those two would act if they’d felt like that.”
Gwen stared into the surface of her rapidly cooling coffee and wondered if she were blushing.
“The unusual activity of the Rift,” Tosh said, working things through out loud, “Affected the echoes of the people who died here. The quantum signatures aligned to their brains and forced them into a psychic template.” She rapped her knuckle against the rim of her mug in thought. “Is there anyway to clean the Hub of those sorts of imprints?”
Jack thought about it and nodded. “Yes, but only if you found a powerfully psychic individual, and augmented them with some technology that doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth yet.”
Tosh nodded, slowly, looking resigned to the situation. She could allow herself to be calm. She’d never seen any of the ghosts.
“You knew them,” Owen said, staring at Jack, “Alex and Susan. Was that how they’d act? Or just how Gwen and Ianto’d act?”
“It was how they’d act,” Jack said, voice cracking, and he abruptly looked away. “Alex and Susan. God, I miss them. All of them,” he said, softly, sincerely, and none of them could think of a response to that.
Possibly they were thinking of the day when Jack would be missing them in turn. Gwen knew she was.
Abruptly, Jack shook his head, and donned a familiar grin, one Gwen was used to seeing when he was trying to diffuse and divert an issue. “So,” he said, glancing first at Ianto and then giving Gwen a definite leer. “That was hot, the two of you.” He gave her an elbow in the side. It was gentle though, little more than nudge. “If you ever fancy repeating that some night in my quarters, clothing optional, of course, you're more than welcome to.”
Owen threw his hands up. “Harkness, you are the bloody end!” He sounded utterly exasperated.
Ianto just smirked and rolled his eyes, and Gwen knew she was blushing furiously. Toshiko had an odd glint in her eye, and a half smile she tried to hide behind her coffee mug. Gwen could take a very good guess at what Tosh was thinking, and reminded herself that it was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for.
“What? Two very attractive people with glorious accents?” Jack grinned at Owen. “Tell me you wouldn't.”
“I think Rhys would object,” Gwen said, diplomatically.
“Invite him along too,” Jack said, “The more the merrier. Tosh and Owen can join in too. This place hasn't seen a good orgy in years.”
“You're completely incorrigible, Jack!” She cried, shoving him hard in the arm, knocking him into Ianto, who held up his mug to prevent the contents from spilling and gave Gwen a glare of mock-severity. Toshiko giggled, and made some sort of aside comment to Owen that had them both laughing, and Gwen felt that warmth in the pit of her stomach again, but this time it was all her own. It was the warmth she felt for these people, who were closer to her than her own family were in some ways, some of whom even managed to survive getting killed.
She refused to look in the direction where she'd seen Susan last, bleeding, weeping, dying, and pushed it out of her mind.
- End