Fic: Cracking (Torchwood, PG-13)
Title: Cracking.
Author: Prochytes.
Fandom: Torchwood.
Rating: PG-13. Dark themes.
Characters/Pairing: Rhys Williams/Gwen Cooper, Lois Habiba.
Disclaimer: All the broken pretty belongs to Auntie Beeb.
Summary: What do you do when your partner’s mind cannot be trusted?
Word Count: 723.
A/N: Spoilers for TW “Children of Earth”, and DW “The Stolen Earth” and "Victory of the Daleks".
Rhys Williams is lying in a room which contains at least seven ways to kill a man. One is loaded in the wardrobe. One is strapped below the bed ready for the smartarse who expects the one in the wardrobe. The rest are locked up in the dark head that rests in the crook of his arm. Rhys does not usually think about the serrated edges at the borders of his life. It is hardly a topic for contemplation, in bed with one’s wife.
Unless, of course, that wife is losing her mind.
Lois had been the first at work to spot the lapses, the inconsistencies, in Gwen’s behaviour. In retrospect, this was not surprising. In her old life, before Torchwood, Lois had been a whistle-blower - although Lois’s whistle had been more like the trumpet that tumbled the walls of Wherever-It-Was. This had come back to Rhys as she sat opposite him in the caff a week ago, distractedly folding a receipt into ever-smaller squares: the least scary woman I know once toppled the government with a snap of those nervous fingers.
Gwen’s slipping, Lois had said. Not with the day-to-day stuff; on that she’s as sharp as ever. But sometimes she gets... confused. Forgets things. I don’t want to pry, Rhys, but has that been happening at home as well?
’Course not, he had lied. Eyes in the back of her head, my Gwen. Always has had; always will. Not working you too hard, is she?
Lois had flushed at the implied rebuke, instantly regretted: No... look... I’m sorry I mentioned it. I have tried to bring it up with her, but she just gives me this sort of guarded look and changes the subject. Could you make sure she’s ok? Even Johnson is getting worried.
Rhys had contemplated observing that anything which brought a measure of distress to Little Miss Leather the Lemon-Sucking Ninja was fine by him. He had bitten it back. If Gwen could forgive Johnson’s previous as a Jack-jacker, so could he. And Lois, of course, was entirely right. I’ll keep an eye out. Look after yourself, Lois.
Rhys shifts, careful not to disturb the warm weight wrapped around him. He must have forgotten to hit the switch on the landing when they turned in for the night; light is spilling into the bedroom from a chink. Getting up to turn it off would mean waking Gwen. He stays put.
Rhys would like to be able to believe Gwen is up to something. That she is faking these lapses. That she is keeping him and her team in the dark for their own good. Maybe Jack Harkness could have believed that. Jack always saw Gwen as his backstop, his safety-net.
But Jack never really understood Gwen, any more than she understood him. That was why they used to flail at one another like those prats with the cotton-buds on Gladiators, each tottering on the pedestal the other had erected. Rhys knows Gwen better than Jack Harkness ever did. He knows that the one thing she cannot offer is safety.
It would not be the first time her mind has given way beneath her cares. Rhy closes his eyes against the sliver of invasive light, and remembers. You have picked the wrong girl to stalk, mate. Two days later and she was right as rain - but that had been while Jack still ruled the roost. Rhys does not want to think about what the strain of running Torchwood has done to his wife. It broke an immortal so badly that he ran away whimpering to the stars (that is not fairly put, and Rhys knows it, but he rolls the sourness around his tongue, just for a moment, as a scrap of solace). How long could one have expected it to take to break her, too? How long before she replaced what really happened with delusion?
Beneath Rhys’s arm, the woman who has somehow convinced herself that a dead race of cyborgs stole the Earth and ran away with it, until Jack’s Doctor brought it back, stirs and mumbles in her sleep. Rhys strokes her back, and tries not to think about tomorrow. He does not remember that the bulb on the landing burned out yesterday.
On the bedroom wall, the thin crack of light gets a little brighter.
FINIS