Moving Forward 3/20
Title: Moving Forward (3/20)
Author: checksandplaid
Pairing: Gwen/Jack, Gwen/Martha friendship
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2421
Warnings: Spoilers through Children of Earth,
Notes: Beta-d by veritas6_5. Cross posted to jack_and_gwen and progwenallies
Summary: When you have nothing left, how do you live? Where do you go? What do you do? An alternate turn of events to 'Miracle Day'
Chapter 1:http://checksandplaid.livejournal.com/984.html#cutid1
Chapter 2:http://checksandplaid.livejournal.com/1119.html#cutid1
Gwen wakes with a jolt, smacking her head against the underside of the desk she’s curled beneath. She scrambles up from where she had passed out, cursing her throbbing skull and aching body. It’s what you deserve for falling asleep on concrete like that. She chides herself, stumbling to the bathroom, splashing water on her face, and adding coffee grounds and water to the tiny coffee machine perched on the sink. She studies her reflection a moment, then fetches her toothbrush, cleans her teeth and rinses the mug sitting beside the coffeepot. She returns to her spot under the desk, and completes the task sleep had interrupted last night. Her new computer hooked up to the network, she boots it up and collects her coffee. The terrible quality doesn’t register as she logs on, perusing Torchwood’s digital state of affairs. There isn’t much she can do here, so double checking the rift monitor in her pocket, she returns to the main area. Here at least is a simple task she can start on: disposing of all the obvious garbage. A quick search yields a pair of thick gloves and a wheelbarrow.
The work is hard, but it’s emotionally safe. Nothing about the anonymous scraps bring to mind that which she would rather forget. Gwen moves through the first heap of mangled steel supports and fragments of furniture; garbage. Three loads disposed of in two hours, and she realizes just how out of shape she is. She takes a moment to rest against the sun warmed metal of the dumpster, and contemplates grabbing some lunch. Maybe after a few more trips; Italian or maybe one of those chips shops down the street. The door pops open as she reaches for the handle, and she jumps back in surprise, reaching for the gun that she left in her office. It takes an instant, but she places the dark woman’s tufted ponytail and red leather jacket as Martha Jones from her brief tenure as a Torchwood operative.
“Hello? Hello? Anyone here? Oi, Gwen!” Martha steps back into the warehouse, propping the door open to ease Gwen’s encumbered ingress.
“Martha.” She trundles her barrow back into the main storage area, jaw tensing as Martha follows.
“Look, Gwen. Can we talk?”
She stops, kneeling over a piece of twisted wreckage. “Please, Martha. I need some time. Alone.” It might have made a shyer person back down. But never Martha Jones.
Martha pulls a wry face at that; grabbing an empty bin from a pile and flipping it over to make an impromptu seat. She balances a brown bag on her knees, and pulls out two Styrofoam packages, still steaming. “You should have this. Shrimp and chips.” She passes over one of the packages. “And you don’t have to talk. But you should listen.”
Gwen gives the doctor a long hard look, before standing and tossing a piece of cement into the barrow. For a moment she considers rejecting whatever condolences or emotional support that are coming, but the aroma, greasy potato heaven, cannot be denied right now. So, for the love of deep-fried sea-food, she consents to listening.
Martha waits until Gwen’s mouth is full before jumping in. “I got a message yesterday that UNIT had recruited you to rebuild Torchwood. I’m here to sign up as a member of your team.”
Gwen chokes at that, she had forgotten that Martha Jones doesn’t have time for dancing around the point. She coughs, pounding her chest, and accepts a bottle of water. “I don’t…” Don’t want your help. Don’t need your company. Leave me alone. “Don’t you have responsibilities at UNIT?”
“They’re big boys. I got clearance from the Minister of Inter-Organizational Affairs to exercise judgment in determining where I’m needed most.” She nibbles a chip daintily. “That’s right here.” She folds up the packaging and places it beside her. “Look. I saw your objectives, and you’re completely mad to accept them.”
Gwen shakes her head mumbling, “I can handle it,” around a mouthful of food.
“Handling it isn’t moving chunks of garbage into the trash, Gwen. You shouldn’t be trying to do this alone. You can’t do it alone.” She stands and closes the distance between them, staring down the slightly shorter woman; her nose inches from Gwen’s. “Let me help you.” She’s begging, but no one knows quite like Martha that there’s no prize at the end of life for doing everything yourself. It’s not a fate to wish on anyone. “Don’t choose to be alone, just because you’re hurting.”
The rift monitor’s sudden beeping is what saves Gwen the trouble of resorting to violence. She turns the screen on, blood pounding in her temple. How dare Martha Jones come in here and start throwing around words like mad and can’t and alone and hurt. What the fuck does someone as blessed with skill and luck and happiness as Martha Jones know about struggle and loss? She never chose to be alone; she is alone and nothing can change that. The tracker in her hands pinpoints of East Tindall Street as the source of the rift’s disturbance. She jogs to her office, grabs her coat, and finds Martha waiting by the door. “I have to go.”
“I’m coming with you.” Martha interrupts as Gwen opens her mouth to argue. “What are you going to do, walk there?” She suffers a momentary flicker of guilt at the pale woman’s slumping shoulders. It’s probably too soon for that level of banter. “Gwen… I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’ll drive you there. Come on.”
Gwen follows, shaking. Even an oblique reference to the accident leaves her dizzy with repressed feelings threatening to overwhelm her. She tries to focus on her surroundings: the sun, locking the warehouse behind them, Martha’s tiny white Beetle. The interior is neat, but miniscule compared to her station wagon, much less any of the more official SUVs. The backseat looks only slightly larger than a field kit.
The car parked and secured, they take a moment to survey the normally busy road. Gwen pokes at her tracker, but it isn’t much good beyond providing an initial location of activity. Her ear feels curiously light with no small curl of plastic and wire; no one to keep watch from afar and provide immediate information about what the CCTVs or camera phones observe. “Looks like a slog.”
Martha looks up from where she’s tinkering with a small palm sized device of her own. “Yeah. Whatever it is went down that side street, there.”
“How do you know?”
Martha shakes her head, checking the gun at her hip and adjusting a bag slung over her shoulder. “Tell you when we get back.” She jogs off, and Gwen can only grumble quietly to herself and follow.
They go on a merry chase, and more than once she considers the possibility that Martha is making the directions up as she goes. Finally they turn down another alleyway and slow their pace at a blood-curdling snarl from around the corner. Gwen moves carefully in front of Martha, pistol out and ready. Peering around the corner, she surveys the nightmarish scene. Blood spatters the walls along both sides of the alley as high as her shoulder, soaking into the heaps of flesh and cloth, pooling on the cement, and staining a Weevil’s skin and boiler suit crimson.
Focus. She steps around the corner, deaf to Martha’s instructions, cutting off the Weevil’s main escape route. It stares her down, nostrils flaring as it tastes the air around her, growls, and tenses to jump in for the kill. Her first shot misses, slicing through the blue material covering its arm, and it stumbles. The blast of a gun from behind her echoes around her skull as she shoots again, and the alien collapses, two holes smoking in its chest. Deliberately, carefully she places the safety back on her pistol and returns it to its holster under her arm before clasping her hands to her ears and cringing.
Martha holsters her weapon, and rubs her ears ruefully. “I forgot about hearing protection.”
“What?”
“We should have worn ear protection!”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“We need to remember ear protection.” There’s a terrible keening in her head; that was stupid. The two women stand silently, and after a few minutes the pain fades though the buzzing persists. She steps through the gore carefully, standing over a corpse, trying to make sense of the blood smears. Gruesome. Maybe if she had been a proper copper in the homicide department, or maybe a detective she could do more now. Maybe.
Martha pulls out a pair of latex gloves from her bag and follows, crouching to examine the victims. “Messy way to go, by Weevil.” She can guess what’s happened here, though it would take a forensics team weeks to confirm anything. Not that they’ll make so much effort for the poor nobodies working at a Burger-Man. She dials the police, “Hello, Dave? I’ve got a class three triple manslaughter behind the Burger-man on Tyndall. Real nasty.” She hangs up and receives a scathing look from Gwen. “What?”
“Police?”
Martha sighs. “Yes. Police. Like what you did before coming here?” She strips off her gloves and tosses them in a rubbish bin against the wall. “Look. Maybe I should have checked. It didn’t occur to me that you might have a different way to handle three dead men and one dead alien. The police come, clean everything up, make up and release some story to the press and the victims’ families about tragic deaths of a rampaging madman and how they took him down in a shootout. Someone gets promoted and we dispose of this Weevil. It’s all neat, you see?”
That explanation makes a lot of sense to Gwen, who never properly came to terms with Torchwood’s favored method of disposal of erasing someone’s existence and faking their death later. “Right.” She hangs back when the coppers show up, observing Martha’s explanation of events, but saying nothing herself.
It hasn’t felt like a full day, but the sun is setting over the wharf when they return to the warehouse, cops placated, weevil disposed of by a black UNIT van, and a small pizza acquired. The two women sit on a bench by the warehouse and Martha digs in while Gwen toys absently with her slice. “How long have you been running Torchwood?”
Martha blinks in surprise, swallows carefully and wipes her lips with a paper napkin before answering. “Only since Jack left and you went traveling. I wouldn’t call it running, per se, more like trying to keep up with the emergencies. Someone was needed to check the alerts and I was the only one who had a monitoring device.” She sips her drink before continuing. “Mostly it was just throwing little band aids everywhere. Coordinating with the police, mostly.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I’m not the Ghostbusters, but I do want to help.”
“Why didn’t you offer to take over as head?” It is strange to hear this from someone who had marched into the Pharm compound admitting her limitations. Martha Jones had seemed like the sort to swim the channel in cement shoes before she’d admit that there was anything she couldn’t accomplish.
Martha stops brooding long enough to laugh shortly. “I’m not mad enough to say yes, you know. There’s all these cloak and dagger secrets I don’t know.”
Gwen shakes her head and blinks rapidly. There’s no reason to cry. He’s still alive somewhere. Gone forever, but still alive. She won’t unravel like an old bit of knitting just by saying his name out loud. “Jack… Jack didn’t share anything he didn’t have to about Torchwood. I don’t know anything.”
“But you know much more than anyone else. You know the passwords to get onto the network and set up new users. You know where to find instructions for Protocol 73A6, or whatever. You know the mad system that the archives use. You know what a lot of the artefacts do. That’s a whole lot more than anyone else knows.” She finishes her drink and toys with the empty container. “I’ll learn whatever you need me to, but I won’t take over as Director. You’ll need to find someone else for that.”
Gwen stands, tossing her nibbled at pizza slice back into the box. “Fine.” It comes out a sigh of resignation. If she says no now, someone higher up will find out, and possibly deduce she had no interest beyond hiding among the remnants of her old life. That conclusion would be untrue, and the interference that followed would be inconvenient. She doesn’t want someone else coming to stand over her shoulder to make sure everything is going well. She can handle it.
Martha stands and flashes her sparkling grin at Gwen’s acquiescence. “Brilliant. Thank you so much.” She tosses away the cardboard box that had held their meal and offers Gwen a hand up from the bench. “Is there anything else today?” There are hundreds of things she wants to say. She wants more responses from Gwen about her family. About Jack. About the 456 incident. About her plans for tomorrow. But she similarly doesn’t want to be fired 10 minutes after being hired on, so she stays quiet.
Gwen shakes her head. “There’s nothing you need to do to secure your transfer from UNIT, right? Figure out what you’ll need for a little medical bay for here, and what might be needed for a more permanent location. I’ll pass it on to whoever is in charge tomorrow. Good night.” She turns and walks back into the warehouse, keenly aware of Martha’s eyes on her retreating back.
Gwen shifts rubble to the dumpster until she’s physically exhausted, showers quickly in her dingy bathroom, and then falls onto her chair, turning her monitor on and dialing the number on the back of the card the aide left with her yesterday. “Hello? Walter? This is Gwen. Could you send another computer and those chairs you mentioned yesterday? No, the one you sent is perfect. I’ve got some new hires coming in. Thanks.” She finds her coffee cup from this morning, takes a gulp, and makes a face before swallowing. Things to do tomorrow: get better coffee. Clean up. Inventory field supplies. Plan in place for tomorrow, she takes another reluctant drink from her mug and settles down to the arduous process of making up a permanent employee account for Martha Jones.
Comments welcome!
Author: checksandplaid
Pairing: Gwen/Jack, Gwen/Martha friendship
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2421
Warnings: Spoilers through Children of Earth,
Notes: Beta-d by veritas6_5. Cross posted to jack_and_gwen and progwenallies
Summary: When you have nothing left, how do you live? Where do you go? What do you do? An alternate turn of events to 'Miracle Day'
Chapter 1:http://checksandplaid.livejournal.com/984.html#cutid1
Chapter 2:http://checksandplaid.livejournal.com/1119.html#cutid1
Gwen wakes with a jolt, smacking her head against the underside of the desk she’s curled beneath. She scrambles up from where she had passed out, cursing her throbbing skull and aching body. It’s what you deserve for falling asleep on concrete like that. She chides herself, stumbling to the bathroom, splashing water on her face, and adding coffee grounds and water to the tiny coffee machine perched on the sink. She studies her reflection a moment, then fetches her toothbrush, cleans her teeth and rinses the mug sitting beside the coffeepot. She returns to her spot under the desk, and completes the task sleep had interrupted last night. Her new computer hooked up to the network, she boots it up and collects her coffee. The terrible quality doesn’t register as she logs on, perusing Torchwood’s digital state of affairs. There isn’t much she can do here, so double checking the rift monitor in her pocket, she returns to the main area. Here at least is a simple task she can start on: disposing of all the obvious garbage. A quick search yields a pair of thick gloves and a wheelbarrow.
The work is hard, but it’s emotionally safe. Nothing about the anonymous scraps bring to mind that which she would rather forget. Gwen moves through the first heap of mangled steel supports and fragments of furniture; garbage. Three loads disposed of in two hours, and she realizes just how out of shape she is. She takes a moment to rest against the sun warmed metal of the dumpster, and contemplates grabbing some lunch. Maybe after a few more trips; Italian or maybe one of those chips shops down the street. The door pops open as she reaches for the handle, and she jumps back in surprise, reaching for the gun that she left in her office. It takes an instant, but she places the dark woman’s tufted ponytail and red leather jacket as Martha Jones from her brief tenure as a Torchwood operative.
“Hello? Hello? Anyone here? Oi, Gwen!” Martha steps back into the warehouse, propping the door open to ease Gwen’s encumbered ingress.
“Martha.” She trundles her barrow back into the main storage area, jaw tensing as Martha follows.
“Look, Gwen. Can we talk?”
She stops, kneeling over a piece of twisted wreckage. “Please, Martha. I need some time. Alone.” It might have made a shyer person back down. But never Martha Jones.
Martha pulls a wry face at that; grabbing an empty bin from a pile and flipping it over to make an impromptu seat. She balances a brown bag on her knees, and pulls out two Styrofoam packages, still steaming. “You should have this. Shrimp and chips.” She passes over one of the packages. “And you don’t have to talk. But you should listen.”
Gwen gives the doctor a long hard look, before standing and tossing a piece of cement into the barrow. For a moment she considers rejecting whatever condolences or emotional support that are coming, but the aroma, greasy potato heaven, cannot be denied right now. So, for the love of deep-fried sea-food, she consents to listening.
Martha waits until Gwen’s mouth is full before jumping in. “I got a message yesterday that UNIT had recruited you to rebuild Torchwood. I’m here to sign up as a member of your team.”
Gwen chokes at that, she had forgotten that Martha Jones doesn’t have time for dancing around the point. She coughs, pounding her chest, and accepts a bottle of water. “I don’t…” Don’t want your help. Don’t need your company. Leave me alone. “Don’t you have responsibilities at UNIT?”
“They’re big boys. I got clearance from the Minister of Inter-Organizational Affairs to exercise judgment in determining where I’m needed most.” She nibbles a chip daintily. “That’s right here.” She folds up the packaging and places it beside her. “Look. I saw your objectives, and you’re completely mad to accept them.”
Gwen shakes her head mumbling, “I can handle it,” around a mouthful of food.
“Handling it isn’t moving chunks of garbage into the trash, Gwen. You shouldn’t be trying to do this alone. You can’t do it alone.” She stands and closes the distance between them, staring down the slightly shorter woman; her nose inches from Gwen’s. “Let me help you.” She’s begging, but no one knows quite like Martha that there’s no prize at the end of life for doing everything yourself. It’s not a fate to wish on anyone. “Don’t choose to be alone, just because you’re hurting.”
The rift monitor’s sudden beeping is what saves Gwen the trouble of resorting to violence. She turns the screen on, blood pounding in her temple. How dare Martha Jones come in here and start throwing around words like mad and can’t and alone and hurt. What the fuck does someone as blessed with skill and luck and happiness as Martha Jones know about struggle and loss? She never chose to be alone; she is alone and nothing can change that. The tracker in her hands pinpoints of East Tindall Street as the source of the rift’s disturbance. She jogs to her office, grabs her coat, and finds Martha waiting by the door. “I have to go.”
“I’m coming with you.” Martha interrupts as Gwen opens her mouth to argue. “What are you going to do, walk there?” She suffers a momentary flicker of guilt at the pale woman’s slumping shoulders. It’s probably too soon for that level of banter. “Gwen… I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’ll drive you there. Come on.”
Gwen follows, shaking. Even an oblique reference to the accident leaves her dizzy with repressed feelings threatening to overwhelm her. She tries to focus on her surroundings: the sun, locking the warehouse behind them, Martha’s tiny white Beetle. The interior is neat, but miniscule compared to her station wagon, much less any of the more official SUVs. The backseat looks only slightly larger than a field kit.
The car parked and secured, they take a moment to survey the normally busy road. Gwen pokes at her tracker, but it isn’t much good beyond providing an initial location of activity. Her ear feels curiously light with no small curl of plastic and wire; no one to keep watch from afar and provide immediate information about what the CCTVs or camera phones observe. “Looks like a slog.”
Martha looks up from where she’s tinkering with a small palm sized device of her own. “Yeah. Whatever it is went down that side street, there.”
“How do you know?”
Martha shakes her head, checking the gun at her hip and adjusting a bag slung over her shoulder. “Tell you when we get back.” She jogs off, and Gwen can only grumble quietly to herself and follow.
They go on a merry chase, and more than once she considers the possibility that Martha is making the directions up as she goes. Finally they turn down another alleyway and slow their pace at a blood-curdling snarl from around the corner. Gwen moves carefully in front of Martha, pistol out and ready. Peering around the corner, she surveys the nightmarish scene. Blood spatters the walls along both sides of the alley as high as her shoulder, soaking into the heaps of flesh and cloth, pooling on the cement, and staining a Weevil’s skin and boiler suit crimson.
Focus. She steps around the corner, deaf to Martha’s instructions, cutting off the Weevil’s main escape route. It stares her down, nostrils flaring as it tastes the air around her, growls, and tenses to jump in for the kill. Her first shot misses, slicing through the blue material covering its arm, and it stumbles. The blast of a gun from behind her echoes around her skull as she shoots again, and the alien collapses, two holes smoking in its chest. Deliberately, carefully she places the safety back on her pistol and returns it to its holster under her arm before clasping her hands to her ears and cringing.
Martha holsters her weapon, and rubs her ears ruefully. “I forgot about hearing protection.”
“What?”
“We should have worn ear protection!”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“We need to remember ear protection.” There’s a terrible keening in her head; that was stupid. The two women stand silently, and after a few minutes the pain fades though the buzzing persists. She steps through the gore carefully, standing over a corpse, trying to make sense of the blood smears. Gruesome. Maybe if she had been a proper copper in the homicide department, or maybe a detective she could do more now. Maybe.
Martha pulls out a pair of latex gloves from her bag and follows, crouching to examine the victims. “Messy way to go, by Weevil.” She can guess what’s happened here, though it would take a forensics team weeks to confirm anything. Not that they’ll make so much effort for the poor nobodies working at a Burger-Man. She dials the police, “Hello, Dave? I’ve got a class three triple manslaughter behind the Burger-man on Tyndall. Real nasty.” She hangs up and receives a scathing look from Gwen. “What?”
“Police?”
Martha sighs. “Yes. Police. Like what you did before coming here?” She strips off her gloves and tosses them in a rubbish bin against the wall. “Look. Maybe I should have checked. It didn’t occur to me that you might have a different way to handle three dead men and one dead alien. The police come, clean everything up, make up and release some story to the press and the victims’ families about tragic deaths of a rampaging madman and how they took him down in a shootout. Someone gets promoted and we dispose of this Weevil. It’s all neat, you see?”
That explanation makes a lot of sense to Gwen, who never properly came to terms with Torchwood’s favored method of disposal of erasing someone’s existence and faking their death later. “Right.” She hangs back when the coppers show up, observing Martha’s explanation of events, but saying nothing herself.
It hasn’t felt like a full day, but the sun is setting over the wharf when they return to the warehouse, cops placated, weevil disposed of by a black UNIT van, and a small pizza acquired. The two women sit on a bench by the warehouse and Martha digs in while Gwen toys absently with her slice. “How long have you been running Torchwood?”
Martha blinks in surprise, swallows carefully and wipes her lips with a paper napkin before answering. “Only since Jack left and you went traveling. I wouldn’t call it running, per se, more like trying to keep up with the emergencies. Someone was needed to check the alerts and I was the only one who had a monitoring device.” She sips her drink before continuing. “Mostly it was just throwing little band aids everywhere. Coordinating with the police, mostly.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I’m not the Ghostbusters, but I do want to help.”
“Why didn’t you offer to take over as head?” It is strange to hear this from someone who had marched into the Pharm compound admitting her limitations. Martha Jones had seemed like the sort to swim the channel in cement shoes before she’d admit that there was anything she couldn’t accomplish.
Martha stops brooding long enough to laugh shortly. “I’m not mad enough to say yes, you know. There’s all these cloak and dagger secrets I don’t know.”
Gwen shakes her head and blinks rapidly. There’s no reason to cry. He’s still alive somewhere. Gone forever, but still alive. She won’t unravel like an old bit of knitting just by saying his name out loud. “Jack… Jack didn’t share anything he didn’t have to about Torchwood. I don’t know anything.”
“But you know much more than anyone else. You know the passwords to get onto the network and set up new users. You know where to find instructions for Protocol 73A6, or whatever. You know the mad system that the archives use. You know what a lot of the artefacts do. That’s a whole lot more than anyone else knows.” She finishes her drink and toys with the empty container. “I’ll learn whatever you need me to, but I won’t take over as Director. You’ll need to find someone else for that.”
Gwen stands, tossing her nibbled at pizza slice back into the box. “Fine.” It comes out a sigh of resignation. If she says no now, someone higher up will find out, and possibly deduce she had no interest beyond hiding among the remnants of her old life. That conclusion would be untrue, and the interference that followed would be inconvenient. She doesn’t want someone else coming to stand over her shoulder to make sure everything is going well. She can handle it.
Martha stands and flashes her sparkling grin at Gwen’s acquiescence. “Brilliant. Thank you so much.” She tosses away the cardboard box that had held their meal and offers Gwen a hand up from the bench. “Is there anything else today?” There are hundreds of things she wants to say. She wants more responses from Gwen about her family. About Jack. About the 456 incident. About her plans for tomorrow. But she similarly doesn’t want to be fired 10 minutes after being hired on, so she stays quiet.
Gwen shakes her head. “There’s nothing you need to do to secure your transfer from UNIT, right? Figure out what you’ll need for a little medical bay for here, and what might be needed for a more permanent location. I’ll pass it on to whoever is in charge tomorrow. Good night.” She turns and walks back into the warehouse, keenly aware of Martha’s eyes on her retreating back.
Gwen shifts rubble to the dumpster until she’s physically exhausted, showers quickly in her dingy bathroom, and then falls onto her chair, turning her monitor on and dialing the number on the back of the card the aide left with her yesterday. “Hello? Walter? This is Gwen. Could you send another computer and those chairs you mentioned yesterday? No, the one you sent is perfect. I’ve got some new hires coming in. Thanks.” She finds her coffee cup from this morning, takes a gulp, and makes a face before swallowing. Things to do tomorrow: get better coffee. Clean up. Inventory field supplies. Plan in place for tomorrow, she takes another reluctant drink from her mug and settles down to the arduous process of making up a permanent employee account for Martha Jones.
Comments welcome!