A Heaven of Hell, A Hell of Heaven - Tosh/Sin (3/13)
Chapter title: Confusion (3/13)
Series title: A Heaven Of Hell, A Hell Of Heaven
Fandom: Torchwood, and Paradise Lost. Yup.
Characters/pairings: Sin, Tosh, and Sin/Tosh.
POV: Tosh, for this chapter
Warnings: Set after Greeks Bearing Gifts, but will probably end up reaching to Exit Wounds, so there will almost certainly be spoilers. At one point, I'm fairly sure I knew where I was going with this, but that was a week or two ago... 0.o
There shouldn't be anything in this chapter that's offensive, unless you have a thing about the mention of underwear.
Disclaimers: Torchwood belongs to the BBC, Paradise Lost belongs (belonged?) to John Milton, the title is from the song by the Zutons, and one in the morning is too late to come up with a better disclaimer than that.
Summary: Tosh wakes up to find that she's being watched over by an anthropomorphic personification, and Sin explains a few things. (There's quite a large time gap between those two events.)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
A/N: Yeah, I know. Delays. Big, big delays. If you're actually following this story, then congratulations for sitting through it, thank you for liking it (which I at least hope you do), and I'm really sorry for not updating it. Does that cover all bases?
This chapter is unbeta'd, because I wrote it over the last four or five hours, and
yarukage is away at the London Expo at the moment, and therefore unavailable for questioning. Therefore, any sort of concrit/review is luff on many levels.
I'm going to hope and pray that, for once, my coding works, because to be honest, I'm knackered and I really don't want to spend two million years trying to get it right. So... erm... Enjoy!
----------
She was still there when I woke up. I was… a part of me was surprised. I thought I must have dreamed her.
And she was in my dream. Darkness, coiled and black, on the one hand, and light on the other, and she stood in the darkness, and Mary was standing in the light. Only then I wasn’t sure which was her and which was Mary, and every time I turned, there was one of them, and I couldn’t tell which.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked quietly, breaking up my snapshot analysis of her.
ldquo;I don’t sleep. Can’t sleep.” She said it… flatly. Very flatly. As though it was perfectly normal, and very obvious.
Well, what do you say to that? I can’t come up with a reply, even now. Certainly not then, half-asleep and lost in thoughts of my own. So I just nodded, with an expression I hoped was sympathetic, although it seemed to be completely lost on her, and stumbled onto my feet.
Wash face. Eyeliner on. Foundation. Lipstick. Muscle memory, they call it, don’t they? That ability to do things without even realising you’re doing them, without thinking about it. Something like that, anyway - and that’s all it was. My mind, all of it, was back in the room just through the door, with the snake-woman and her quiet, iridescent eyes. I’m still amazed that I managed to put mascara on without poking my eye out - that’s how distracted I was.
Brush hair. Drag on clothes. Check phone. Pick up bag. Dig around for keys. Maybe autopilot would be a better way of putting it - something mechanical, something apart from your mind. I was already in my bra and knickers before I even remembered she was there at all. Glancing up, I saw that she was still watching me, her expression unreadable. I found myself blushing as I tugged on my jacket, but somehow, I didn’t mind that much. Maybe because she didn’t seem to care, or even notice.
Keys in pocket. Phone in handbag. I picked up my coat from the hook on the back of the door, glanced at my watch, and swore. I must have taken longer than I’d thought, distracted. Autopilot. Muscle memory. It didn’t really matter, anyway. I had to hurry, or I’d be late.
And if I was late, then they’d start to join up the dots, and work out that something odd was going on. They’d been looking at me strangely ever since the Mary incident, and I didn’t blame them. I’d been looking at me strangely, every time I saw a mirror.
But I wasn’t going to let them notice this strangeness. I wasn’t going to let them come poking around my flat, to stop it happening again.
They couldn’t have her. They couldn’t have Sin.
I was late, in the end. Almost five minutes.
Only Ianto noticed, I think. Gwen wasn’t there yet - hardly surprising - and Owen barely even glanced up from the autopsy bay as I went past. Jack was… not there. Locked up in his office. Still in somebody else’s house with a strange woman. Or man. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I think, maybe, that I still hadn’t forgiven him for what he did to Mary. To me.
He could be at the bottom of the Bay for all I cared.
But Ianto looked up as I walked into the Hub, and took in the fact that I had three buttons in the wrong holes and twice as much eyeliner on one eye as the other.
“Coffee?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Never mind us field agents, saving the world from aliens on a daily basis. Ianto Jones is the real lifesaver.
“Coffee,” I confirmed, plonking myself down at my desk.
And the day went past. Normal. Boring. No Rift activity.
Little things, because my mind was somewhere else. At home, with Sin, trying to work out just what it was that made things that way.
I spent all day terrified that the others would notice, and the fact that they didn’t brought me no relief. And they noticed that nervousness, if nothing else. Even Owen managed to look up from the elbow-deep guts of whatever he was working on for long enough to ask me sardonically was Ianto’s coffee really that full of caffeine? Why was I acting like a little squirrel or something? On drugs?
And I told him to shut up, and went back to searching for the tiny, tiny piece of wiring, because it was simpler than actually thinking what a good question it was.
Jack didn’t mention the phone call from the night before, a fact for which I was profoundly grateful, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t like him at the moment, and also that hugging him when he let me out an hour early would be extremely unprofessional, not to mention a good way to get his hand on my arse. I wasn’t in the mood for Jack being Jack.
But I was glad to get out of there. More to the point, I was glad to get home. Home, to see whether she was waiting for me.
And she was.
I walked in, put my coat away, kicked off my shoes - and I didn’t expect her to be there any more. But she was; coiled up in the corner, with the dogs round her waist snarling and snapping, and when she saw me coming in, her eyes lit up.
“You’re back,” she said, and she honestly did sound almost surprised.
“Of course I’m back. I live here.” I smiled back at her, tossing my keys down on the table and pulling my bag off my shoulder. “You’re still here.”
“Of course I am,” she said, as if it was obvious; as if it had always been obvious. “Where else would I be?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Where does Sin normally spend her time?” For some reason, that struck me as funny. The corners of my mouth quirked up a little further, although I didn’t laugh.
She didn’t, either. But she smiled, for a brief moment; the first time I’d seen her smile, and a little more of the sadness left her eyes.
“Will you tell me your story?” she asked, gliding after me as I walked through into my room and pulled out a file of papers from one drawer.
I looked up from the spine of the folder, not quite sure what she meant. And perhaps she could tell.
“Your story,” she repeated. “Your life. I told you my story, last night. I want to hear yours.”
Fair exchange is no robbery, I thought, and put the papers to one side, nodding. “My story?” I wasn’t sure… I’ve never liked talking about myself. Never. And certainly not to somebody I’ve only known for a couple of days.
But then, I’d trusted Mary, and where did that get me?
“Please?” she asked, almost shyly, and I nodded slowly, folding my hands in my lap and looking down at my feet, gnawing on my lip for a moment. Then, without looking up, I started to tell it.
I won’t go into what I said. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t important.
Suffice to say, it took a long time, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that I got choked up occasionally, had to hide sobs in coughs. By the time I got to Mary, my mascara was all smudged, and my knees were wet with tiny dark circles of salt water. Swallowing, I looked up at her, at last.
She was watching me closely, her eyes wide, and I’m sure I saw tears in them.
“It’s not much of a story, I know,” I managed, rallying myself. “Not compared to yours. I don’t have anything really to be upset about.”
She regarded me for a moment, shaking her head, and then beckoned. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
In the bathroom, she pointed to the sink. “Can you fill that up for me?”
I nodded, surreptitiously wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand, and twisted the tap quickly, watching the water thunder into the porcelain sink.
“That’s time,” she said, pointing to the water. “I don’t live there. I’m a constant. I don’t change, but at the same time, I’m always changing.”
As the basin filled to the top, I shut the water off again, wondering where this was all leading.
“Pick that up,” she told me, pointing to the bottle of shampoo that stood neatly in place by the shower. Even more confused now, I did so, flicking it open with a frown.
“Put it in the water, and then stir the water.” Still absolutely calm, her expression completely unreadable, she coiled her snake’s tail around herself, watching me closely. I did so, watching the bubbles foam onto the surface. Flicked the top back onto the bottle, without even thinking about it, and put it back where it belonged, lining it up neatly with the other bottles on the shelf.
“Now, pick me up some of those bubbles. Properly, I mean. Close your hand around them.”
Raising my eyebrows slightly, I did as she said. Or at least, I tried to. Each time I tried, one of two things happened; either the foam slid from my hand, or the bubbles popped.
“Fragile. They break easily, and they don’t last long.” She’d moved slightly, closer to my side. Somehow, I didn’t mind.
“Now imagine you’re me, and those bubbles are human lives. They’re all connected. Break one, and it damages the others, makes it die that little bit sooner. And when you try to grip them, they’re gone.” She sighed, looking at me. “Do you see my point? When you lose somebody, you humans, you lose a little part of yourself. You’re… you’re linked. When something happens, it changes you.” Brushing her intangible hand through the foam on top of the water, she sighed again, deeper this time. “And when I try to grasp one of them, to hold them apart and keep them safe, I only lose it quicker. I can’t hold humanity - but that doesn’t mean their stories are less important. If anything, they’re more so, because everyone’s story changes everyone else’s. Nothing is changed because of mine.” Almost to herself, she repeated softly, “And I can’t hold humanity. You can’t hold a soap bubble in a closed fist.”
I swallowed, biting my lip, and looked over at her.
Then I opened my hand, and her smile was like a thousand suns.
I looked down, smiling myself, at the bubble that quivered, shimmering and shifting, in my open palm.
Series title: A Heaven Of Hell, A Hell Of Heaven
Fandom: Torchwood, and Paradise Lost. Yup.
Characters/pairings: Sin, Tosh, and Sin/Tosh.
POV: Tosh, for this chapter
Warnings: Set after Greeks Bearing Gifts, but will probably end up reaching to Exit Wounds, so there will almost certainly be spoilers. At one point, I'm fairly sure I knew where I was going with this, but that was a week or two ago... 0.o
There shouldn't be anything in this chapter that's offensive, unless you have a thing about the mention of underwear.
Disclaimers: Torchwood belongs to the BBC, Paradise Lost belongs (belonged?) to John Milton, the title is from the song by the Zutons, and one in the morning is too late to come up with a better disclaimer than that.
Summary: Tosh wakes up to find that she's being watched over by an anthropomorphic personification, and Sin explains a few things. (There's quite a large time gap between those two events.)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
A/N: Yeah, I know. Delays. Big, big delays. If you're actually following this story, then congratulations for sitting through it, thank you for liking it (which I at least hope you do), and I'm really sorry for not updating it. Does that cover all bases?
This chapter is unbeta'd, because I wrote it over the last four or five hours, and
yarukage is away at the London Expo at the moment, and therefore unavailable for questioning. Therefore, any sort of concrit/review is luff on many levels.
I'm going to hope and pray that, for once, my coding works, because to be honest, I'm knackered and I really don't want to spend two million years trying to get it right. So... erm... Enjoy!
----------
She was still there when I woke up. I was… a part of me was surprised. I thought I must have dreamed her.
And she was in my dream. Darkness, coiled and black, on the one hand, and light on the other, and she stood in the darkness, and Mary was standing in the light. Only then I wasn’t sure which was her and which was Mary, and every time I turned, there was one of them, and I couldn’t tell which.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked quietly, breaking up my snapshot analysis of her.
ldquo;I don’t sleep. Can’t sleep.” She said it… flatly. Very flatly. As though it was perfectly normal, and very obvious.
Well, what do you say to that? I can’t come up with a reply, even now. Certainly not then, half-asleep and lost in thoughts of my own. So I just nodded, with an expression I hoped was sympathetic, although it seemed to be completely lost on her, and stumbled onto my feet.
Wash face. Eyeliner on. Foundation. Lipstick. Muscle memory, they call it, don’t they? That ability to do things without even realising you’re doing them, without thinking about it. Something like that, anyway - and that’s all it was. My mind, all of it, was back in the room just through the door, with the snake-woman and her quiet, iridescent eyes. I’m still amazed that I managed to put mascara on without poking my eye out - that’s how distracted I was.
Brush hair. Drag on clothes. Check phone. Pick up bag. Dig around for keys. Maybe autopilot would be a better way of putting it - something mechanical, something apart from your mind. I was already in my bra and knickers before I even remembered she was there at all. Glancing up, I saw that she was still watching me, her expression unreadable. I found myself blushing as I tugged on my jacket, but somehow, I didn’t mind that much. Maybe because she didn’t seem to care, or even notice.
Keys in pocket. Phone in handbag. I picked up my coat from the hook on the back of the door, glanced at my watch, and swore. I must have taken longer than I’d thought, distracted. Autopilot. Muscle memory. It didn’t really matter, anyway. I had to hurry, or I’d be late.
And if I was late, then they’d start to join up the dots, and work out that something odd was going on. They’d been looking at me strangely ever since the Mary incident, and I didn’t blame them. I’d been looking at me strangely, every time I saw a mirror.
But I wasn’t going to let them notice this strangeness. I wasn’t going to let them come poking around my flat, to stop it happening again.
They couldn’t have her. They couldn’t have Sin.
I was late, in the end. Almost five minutes.
Only Ianto noticed, I think. Gwen wasn’t there yet - hardly surprising - and Owen barely even glanced up from the autopsy bay as I went past. Jack was… not there. Locked up in his office. Still in somebody else’s house with a strange woman. Or man. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I think, maybe, that I still hadn’t forgiven him for what he did to Mary. To me.
He could be at the bottom of the Bay for all I cared.
But Ianto looked up as I walked into the Hub, and took in the fact that I had three buttons in the wrong holes and twice as much eyeliner on one eye as the other.
“Coffee?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Never mind us field agents, saving the world from aliens on a daily basis. Ianto Jones is the real lifesaver.
“Coffee,” I confirmed, plonking myself down at my desk.
And the day went past. Normal. Boring. No Rift activity.
Little things, because my mind was somewhere else. At home, with Sin, trying to work out just what it was that made things that way.
I spent all day terrified that the others would notice, and the fact that they didn’t brought me no relief. And they noticed that nervousness, if nothing else. Even Owen managed to look up from the elbow-deep guts of whatever he was working on for long enough to ask me sardonically was Ianto’s coffee really that full of caffeine? Why was I acting like a little squirrel or something? On drugs?
And I told him to shut up, and went back to searching for the tiny, tiny piece of wiring, because it was simpler than actually thinking what a good question it was.
Jack didn’t mention the phone call from the night before, a fact for which I was profoundly grateful, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t like him at the moment, and also that hugging him when he let me out an hour early would be extremely unprofessional, not to mention a good way to get his hand on my arse. I wasn’t in the mood for Jack being Jack.
But I was glad to get out of there. More to the point, I was glad to get home. Home, to see whether she was waiting for me.
And she was.
I walked in, put my coat away, kicked off my shoes - and I didn’t expect her to be there any more. But she was; coiled up in the corner, with the dogs round her waist snarling and snapping, and when she saw me coming in, her eyes lit up.
“You’re back,” she said, and she honestly did sound almost surprised.
“Of course I’m back. I live here.” I smiled back at her, tossing my keys down on the table and pulling my bag off my shoulder. “You’re still here.”
“Of course I am,” she said, as if it was obvious; as if it had always been obvious. “Where else would I be?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Where does Sin normally spend her time?” For some reason, that struck me as funny. The corners of my mouth quirked up a little further, although I didn’t laugh.
She didn’t, either. But she smiled, for a brief moment; the first time I’d seen her smile, and a little more of the sadness left her eyes.
“Will you tell me your story?” she asked, gliding after me as I walked through into my room and pulled out a file of papers from one drawer.
I looked up from the spine of the folder, not quite sure what she meant. And perhaps she could tell.
“Your story,” she repeated. “Your life. I told you my story, last night. I want to hear yours.”
Fair exchange is no robbery, I thought, and put the papers to one side, nodding. “My story?” I wasn’t sure… I’ve never liked talking about myself. Never. And certainly not to somebody I’ve only known for a couple of days.
But then, I’d trusted Mary, and where did that get me?
“Please?” she asked, almost shyly, and I nodded slowly, folding my hands in my lap and looking down at my feet, gnawing on my lip for a moment. Then, without looking up, I started to tell it.
I won’t go into what I said. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t important.
Suffice to say, it took a long time, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that I got choked up occasionally, had to hide sobs in coughs. By the time I got to Mary, my mascara was all smudged, and my knees were wet with tiny dark circles of salt water. Swallowing, I looked up at her, at last.
She was watching me closely, her eyes wide, and I’m sure I saw tears in them.
“It’s not much of a story, I know,” I managed, rallying myself. “Not compared to yours. I don’t have anything really to be upset about.”
She regarded me for a moment, shaking her head, and then beckoned. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
In the bathroom, she pointed to the sink. “Can you fill that up for me?”
I nodded, surreptitiously wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand, and twisted the tap quickly, watching the water thunder into the porcelain sink.
“That’s time,” she said, pointing to the water. “I don’t live there. I’m a constant. I don’t change, but at the same time, I’m always changing.”
As the basin filled to the top, I shut the water off again, wondering where this was all leading.
“Pick that up,” she told me, pointing to the bottle of shampoo that stood neatly in place by the shower. Even more confused now, I did so, flicking it open with a frown.
“Put it in the water, and then stir the water.” Still absolutely calm, her expression completely unreadable, she coiled her snake’s tail around herself, watching me closely. I did so, watching the bubbles foam onto the surface. Flicked the top back onto the bottle, without even thinking about it, and put it back where it belonged, lining it up neatly with the other bottles on the shelf.
“Now, pick me up some of those bubbles. Properly, I mean. Close your hand around them.”
Raising my eyebrows slightly, I did as she said. Or at least, I tried to. Each time I tried, one of two things happened; either the foam slid from my hand, or the bubbles popped.
“Fragile. They break easily, and they don’t last long.” She’d moved slightly, closer to my side. Somehow, I didn’t mind.
“Now imagine you’re me, and those bubbles are human lives. They’re all connected. Break one, and it damages the others, makes it die that little bit sooner. And when you try to grip them, they’re gone.” She sighed, looking at me. “Do you see my point? When you lose somebody, you humans, you lose a little part of yourself. You’re… you’re linked. When something happens, it changes you.” Brushing her intangible hand through the foam on top of the water, she sighed again, deeper this time. “And when I try to grasp one of them, to hold them apart and keep them safe, I only lose it quicker. I can’t hold humanity - but that doesn’t mean their stories are less important. If anything, they’re more so, because everyone’s story changes everyone else’s. Nothing is changed because of mine.” Almost to herself, she repeated softly, “And I can’t hold humanity. You can’t hold a soap bubble in a closed fist.”
I swallowed, biting my lip, and looked over at her.
Then I opened my hand, and her smile was like a thousand suns.
I looked down, smiling myself, at the bubble that quivered, shimmering and shifting, in my open palm.