Fic: Step by Step
Title: Step by Step
Author tearoseandhoney
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairing: Gwen, Rhys, Andy, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death
Prompt: Torchwood, Gwen, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Written for dark_fest
Notes: Thanks to lefaym for the excellent and thorough beta.
First Step
“No, I don’t know what time I’ll be back. You’d better just put her to bed, Rhys.” Gwen didn’t like the snappishness of her tone, but then she didn’t like the fact that she was freezing her arse off in a bit of wasteland at the edge of Cardiff instead of being at home reading her daughter a bedtime story. She said her goodbye to Rhys and tried to keep the resentment out of her voice when she heard Carys calling for him in the background.
Pocketing her phone, Gwen scanned the field for her team. Alan and Jess were collecting body parts, Laurence was still placing yellow markers down to indicate possible biological material, and Sarah was doing something with a computer that Gwen knew she’d never understand. That much Gwen had expected. What she hadn’t expected was to see Detective Chief Superintendant Crowthar walking towards her. The police had abandoned the scene as soon as Torchwood showed up. It was so obviously alien that the pair of detectives who’d been called out hadn’t even bothered to open their notebooks. She couldn’t imagine that Crowthar was here to start a turf war.
“Hello, Sir,” Gwen said, surprised. He wasn’t ‘sir’ to her anymore, of course. But it couldn’t hurt to be a bit polite when her old Chief Super turned up. Especially when he turned up at a bog standard Torchwood crime scene with no warning.
“Good to see you doing so well for yourself, Gwen Cooper. Or is it Williams now?”
“I’m still Gwen Cooper, Sir.”Out of the corner of her eye Gwen saw her newest team member heading towards her. She gestured, subtly, for Sarah to go away. She didn’t know why the Super was here exchanging small talk with her but she had a horrible feeling it wasn’t something she wanted her team to hear.
“Thing is, Gwen, what with you picking up where Captain Harkness left off, we’d been expecting to hear about our little agreement. And when we didn’t, well we were going to let you get on with things your way but that doesn’t seem to have worked out too well.” The man gestured towards the mess of blood and flesh that Alan was scooping into a body bag.
“Sorry, David. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gwen said. “Why don’t we talk about it at the station?”
*
“No bloody way. Jack would never have done that.” She knew he would have, though, and it was just one more reason to curse him.
“Look, Gwen, it’s the perfect solution. Your Rift gadget shows you’ve got something nasty on your hands, and we’ve got plenty that’s nasty on ours, so we bait a trap for you and everyone wins.”
“Except the bait.”
“They’re not bloody scouts, we’re giving you. These are seriously nasty people. So yeah, if they do get hurt, no one’s going to shed any tears over them.”
Gwen got up, chair slamming to the floor behind her from the force of her movement. She’d liked the man sitting in front of her. She remembered when he’d arrived from the force in Avon, how she’d thought he was going to clean things up, and all the time he’d been guarding this filthy deal. She stormed out of the station, barely nodding in response to Andy’s hello as she passed.
*
“Are you happy now, then?” Chief Superintendent David Crowthar closed the door of the mortuary behind him as he entered. Gwen had been expecting the coroner so she could check that all the paperwork for the latest victim of the Rift was in order. She found that she wasn’t exactly surprised, though, that it was Crowthar. She’d got a call from him just after the Rift spike, repeating his offer. She hadn’t spoken to him then, just hung up, and she wasn’t intending to speak to him now.
“Look at him, just seventeen. So much ahead of him.” Gwen couldn’t stop herself from looking at the body on the slab. She thought he’d probably been a handsome lad but it was difficult to tell with the stitches holding him together now. “We could have stopped this,” Crowthar continued.
“You don’t know that,” Gwen said. She realised even before she spoke that it was a mistake to respond to him but she couldn’t stop herself.
“There’s something else I want to show you.” He walked over to another slab. She followed, anxious to have this over with. Crowthar stopped and Gwen found herself looking down at the body of an old woman. Gwen didn’t need to read any post-mortem report to see that this wasn’t a natural death . The bruises all over the body told her more than the clinical words of a doctor’s report could have.
“Mrs Carey’s son. He’s a nasty piece of work.” Crowthar said. “We’ve been watching him for a while but there’s never been anything that would stick. He lives in the area your monster first turned up in. If Harkness had still been around, we’d have used him as bait. Might have got to him before he offed his mam. Funny thing is, when you took over that Torchwood racket I asked your old sergeant what we could expect. He thought you’d be no problem. Said you cared about people.”
“Fuck you.” Gwen’s heels smacked against the mortuary floor as she headed for the door.
*
“So you don’t think it was my fault, then?” Gwen asked.
“Course I don’t. Bloody hell, Gwen. How could I? You’re doing your best to keep people safe from aliens just like we’re doing our best to keep Cardiff safe from criminals. We can’t be perfect, we just have to try our best.”
“I know, Andy.” Gwen twisted her hands around the mug of bitter, greasy spoon coffee. She wasn’t going to drink the dreadful stuff but at least the scalding liquid was good for warming her cold hands. “But I can still see them and I can’t help thinking that maybe I could have saved them. If they had to choose between me not having to trouble my conscience and them being alive what do you think they’d pick?”
Andy didn’t answer her. There was nothing he could say but Gwen couldn’t bear to sit in that cafe with the silence choking them and wait for him to work that out.
“Listen, thanks for the coffee but I’ve got to be off,” Gwen said. She didn’t look back as she left the cafe.
When she got home she went to the computer and sent an email. By the morning she had Crowthar’s list.
Quick step
They were a good team, all in all, but she wondered if Owen and Tosh and Ianto had driven Jack mad in the same way. She wondered if she had. For a moment she wished she could apologise.
“Look, I know you’re worried about Jess, I am too, but it’s too dangerous to go in until we know more. Steph is running the scans now, we just need to wait.”
Laurence glared at her, and it seemed like he was going to obey until a scream burst from the building in front of them.
“Gwen, she’ll be dead before we get the results of those scans. Let me go in.”
“Okay.”
Laurence raced towards the warehouse. When the explosion ripped through it there was nothing Gwen could do.
*
Gwen stood beside Rhys and let the words of the funeral service wash over her. It wasn’t the first time one of her team had died. It wasn’t even the first time one of them had died because of one of her decisions. Normally, she’d go home and talk it through with Rhys, picking over every possibility, all the different endings that could have been. This was different, though. This was the first time she couldn’t tell if she’d done the right thing or not. Jess had been one of the coffin bearers, and how could Gwen decide if she’d been right to allow Laurence to risk his life to save his team mate? He’d managed to drag Jess to shelter before the explosion. There was no way she could have moved herself and the mess of Laurence’s remains had illustrated the effect of the explosion on an unprotected body.
“All right, love. You ready to head off?” Rhys asked. The mourners were starting to drift out and Gwen never went to wakes for team members; too difficult to answer questions about how she knew the dead person, too difficult to look at the grieving relatives.
“No. You head home, sweetheart. I have some things I need to do.” She tried not to notice the hurt in Rhys’s eyes. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t feel colder without Rhys at her side.
Side step
“Don’t do this, Gwen. I’m warning you.”
She walked around Rhys and slammed her office door shut. It wouldn’t do much; there was far too much glass in the new Hub to be able to have a truly private conversation but, she felt slightly better knowing her team couldn’t hear every single word of the row she was having with her husband.
“Do you think I’m doing this on purpose, Rhys? That I invited some aliens to come round at the exact same time as my daughter’s nativity play so I could get out of it? Get a grip, man.”
She was furious and so was Rhys. If they had any sense they’d stop now, cool off and then try to have this conversation later. Strange that she could know that and yet do nothing to make it happen.
“Yeah, well sometimes I wonder, Gwen. Whether nativity plays and supermarkets and washing up aren’t just beneath you. The great Gwen Cooper and her important life are so much more worthy than the rest of us.”
“What do you want me to do, Rhys? We’re in the middle of a crisis. My team need me here until we’re done.” And really, what did he want her to do? They both knew how important Torchwood was. There was a pause and Gwen knew this was the chance to make peace, to get this argument under control before anything got broken for good. But she was so angry - with herself, with Rhys, with the fact that she’d come home yesterday covered in blood, showered and stayed up until four in the morning sewing an angel costume that she wasn’t going to see her daughter wearing after all - that she couldn’t stop herself.
“You want to swap places Rhys? I go to the nativity play and you do my job? Expect we both know you wouldn’t last five minutes.”
He pushed the door open so hard it smacked against the wall. Gwen watched from the open doorway as Rhys stormed out of the Hub. He was nearly at the entrance when he turned.
“You might be pretty hot when it comes to shooting things, Gwen, but as a mother you’re a disaster.”
*
She’d been checking her watch every five minutes for the past hour but it hadn’t slowed down time any. Things were nearly under control, another half hour and they’d be home and dry. It was just a shame that the nativity started in ten minutes.
“You should go,” Alan said. “It’s just clean up now. We don’t need the boss here for that.”
“You don’t know that. The whole point of cleaning up the mess is to check there are no nasty surprises.” She should stay, she knew that, but she should also be at Carys’s play.
“Gwen, honestly. Me and Mike know the drill by now, we’ll make sure Danny and Liz are okay. Go.”
Gwen went, still calling instructions over her shoulder as walked to her car.
*
“Sorry love,” Gwen whispered, slipping into the seat beside Rhys. She’d made it with thirty seconds to spare. Rhys turned to kiss her on the cheek.
“Allsort?” he said, holding out the bag.
*
Gwen had left her phone on, of course. But by the time it rang the screams had already started.
*
The dawn chorus was singing when Gwen opened her front door. Rhys was waiting for her with a cup of tea. The whisky in it burned her throat as she swallowed.
Gwen curled up on the sofa, watching the sun rise through the window. Rhys was next to her, waiting for her to speak if she needed to, waiting to tell her that she’d done her best, that no one could have done better. She didn’t speak though. She couldn’t trust herself. It wasn’t Rhys’s fault of course but all she’d been able to think of, talking to the parents of that poor boy, was that she could have stopped it. If only she’d been on the scene from the start and not at that bloody play she could have stopped it all. So she didn’t speak, and neither did Rhys.
The silence was safer.
Step change
She’d known, ever since she’d agreed to the deal with Crowther that it wouldn’t end there. She’d compromised herself once, for the best of reasons she thought at the time. She’d been waiting for the next test for years. So in a way, it was a relief to find Johnson waiting for her in the Hub, a gang of red berets surrounding her.
“Hello, Cooper. We need to talk.” Gwen didn’t know whether to be worried or pleased that she got a greeting. She gestured for Johnson to enter the office and shut the door on the woman’s UNIT flunkeys.
“What do you want?” Gwen asked.
“The same thing you do - to save the world.”
*
Gwen tried to sleep that night. She kept waking to the sound of Rhys’s breathing, blinking her eyes and tying to forget the vicious, viscous red that stained her dreams. She wished, as she had tried and failed to keep from wishing for the past seven years, that this had happened on Jack’s watch.
Johnson wanted a weapon, something that had fallen though the Rift in the year of Edward VII’s coronation, something that was so dangerous Jack had hidden it from the rest of Torchwood, hidden it, kept it secret through two World Wars and countless skirmishes with hostile aliens. It would still be hidden if Johnson hadn’t blown up the old Hub all those years ago, and Gwen couldn’t decide if that was ironic or just a kick in the guts.
She still wasn’t sure, even after Johnson’s explanation, what the weapon did but it seemed like it would save only a little more than it would destroy.
“All right, love?” Rhys asked, face still pressed into his pillow. She wasn’t, of course but she’d tried to keep Rhys away from Torchwood’s filthy secrets ever since they became her secrets.
“Fine, just work.” Rhys didn’t say anything but suddenly she wanted to tell him, wanted to go back to that brief period when there had been no secrets between them.
“It’s just that I’ve got to make a choice, sweetheart. And people are going to die either way, but if I get it wrong there are going to be more deaths.”
Rhys pulled her closer to him, her back against the warmth of his chest. “You’ll do the right thing. You always do.” She knew, now, how little that meant. She’d known at least since the fiasco last Christmas. She thought maybe Rhys was starting to realise as well.
If she was looking at him, she didn’t think she’d be able to say it but here, in the dark, eyes on her bedroom wall, the words came.
“I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Rhys said. It wasn’t but she let the words and the warmth soothe her.
*
In the end she waited to see how things would unfold. It was one of the things she tortured herself with, later. Whether they could have found a different way, if she’d waited longer, or if the death toll would have been lower if she’d acted sooner. But she waited until the first reports came in, until she had a folder full of pictures of jigsaw people that she’d never be able to put back together.
By the time she was ready to leave, weapon in a lead-lined briefcase handcuffed to her arm, the reports were starting to flow out to the public. Rhys was watching a news bulletin when she went to say goodbye.
“What the bloody hell is happening?” he asked, taking in her case and the travelling bag slung over her shoulder.
“You don’t want to know.” She kissed him goodbye.
“I’ll go and get Cerys so you can say goodbye to her,” Rhys said.
“No, just tell her I love her and give her a big kiss from me.” Gwen didn’t want to see her baby until this was all over.
*
She didn’t think she’d ever feel clean again but at least after a shower at the Hub she felt like she could go home.
When she got there Rhys had already packed his bags, Cerys standing beside him in the coat Gwen had bought her for her sixth birthday.
“Rhys, what’s going on?”
“Mam, take Cerys to the car.” Gwen turned round to see Brenda, bloody Brenda, standing behind her. She glared at Gwen and held her hand out for Cerys. Gwen waited until the door closed behind her daughter to ask again.
“Rhys, you tell me what the hell you think you’re doing, right now.”
“I’ve seen the bloody news, Gwen.” He gestured towards the television, footage of the aftermath Gwen turned away before she could get any more than a vague impression of what was happening on the screen. She didn’t want to think about what she’d been doing when that footage was taken.
“Look at me and tell me that wasn’t you lot and I’ll stay.” She couldn’t, of course. There might have been a time when she could lie to Rhys and make him believe but she’d forgotten how to be that person and he’d grown out of being that man.
“What you’ve done, it’s - I don’t even know how to put a word to what you’ve done.” Gwen had never heard Rhys use that tone to her. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him use it before at all.
“Rhys, you don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. But that’s because you don’t want me too.” She didn’t want him too. She didn’t want anyone to understand what it had been like to stand in that cold room, buried in the earth and watch as the dying began.
“Rhys, please. Don’t leave. Don’t throw everything away for this one thing.”
“It’s not just this one thing, Gwen. You know it isn’t.” And Rhys was right again, damn him. They’d been drifting away from each other for a while and she’d been too scared to do anything about it, scared that the swell and the ripples from any action she took would just make things worse.
Rhys walked past her, towards the door and it was too much that after everything she’d given to keep the world together her world was falling apart.
“Don’t you dare walk out of that door Rhys,” Gwen shouted. “Do you think you can just take my child and walk out on me? Six hours ago I was briefing the fucking Prime Minister. You can’t do this to me.”
Rhys paused at the open door.
“For God’s sake, Gwen. I don’t even know who you are any more.”
Stepping stone
She hadn’t seen him since the day he walked out. At least, she hadn’t seen him in the flesh. She’d kept tabs on him, at first. Used the CCTV footage she had access to and checked that he was okay. When she’d picked up Cerys for her increasingly rare visits, Brenda or Barry would be there. Once it became clear that he was moving on, though, it was too painful to watch. Seventeen years on and she still loved him as much as she ever had. Her love was darker, now, mixed with guilt and anger and grief. But it was still love and that made the whole situation unbearable. Rhys was trapped, along with thirty four other hostages in St David’s Shopping Centre.
Torchwood had a policy, of course, of not negotiating with hostage takers, but they’d never been good at following protocol. Especially not when emotions were involved.
“UNIT are never going to let us make this swap, Gwen. What do you want us to do?” Danny, her second in command, passed her a cup of coffee as he spoke.
“Tell UNIT we’re handling it. We’re going in.”
“Sure that’s wise?”
“No,” Gwen said. She really wasn’t, but with UNIT involved there was no way to make a deal, and she couldn’t leave Rhys in there. Not even after he’d left her. She made an effort to smile. “But we’re Torchwood.”
Last step
She was standing over the sink rinsing out her bloodstained blouse when she heard the door slam. Cerys came straight to the kitchen but it was several minutes before she spoke.
“Did you do this on purpose?”
“Do what?” Gwen turned to look at her daughter. “Try to save my husband?”
“He hasn’t been your husband for years.” Legally, they both know that’s not true. Rhys had moved on, true, but for some reason he’d never cut that last thread between them. Gwen wanted to believe it was love but she suspected that it was a last mercy to a woman he had loved once.
“Did you get him killed on purpose?”
Gwen had thought that she was too tired to be angry but Cerys’s words sparked something inside her.
“I bet you’ve been waiting all this time for a chance to get back at him and now you’ve finally managed it,” Cerys continued.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re just a child, you can’t possibly understand -“
“Can’t understand what, Gwen? All the terrible things you’ve done? Because, no. I can’t understand them.”
Gwen clung to the shreds that remained of her temper and tried to soften her voice.
“I know you’re grieving, sweetheart, but so am I. I want to be there for you, to help you.”
Cerys slapped away the hand that Gwen had extended to her.
“Oh fuck off, Gwen.”
“Don’t speak to me like that. I’m still your mother.” Gwen could feel hysterical laugher bubbling up at the absurdity of those words at such a time.
“No. You’re a lot of things, Gwen. But you’re not that.”
Gwen couldn’t think of anything to say as her daughter walked out. She wondered if Jack had felt like this, if he’d been able to see all his missteps, all the turns that had led him to hell. She could, but it didn’t help. Even with all her mistakes laid out like a map before her Gwen wasn’t sure there could ever have been another route for her.
*
Danny,
Don’t bother trying to find me. You won’t. A long time ago I told someone that they couldn’t keep running away. I guess it’s time for me to find out whether that’s true or not.
Try to get out while there’s still something worth leaving for.
Gwen
Author tearoseandhoney
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairing: Gwen, Rhys, Andy, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Character death
Prompt: Torchwood, Gwen, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Written for dark_fest
Notes: Thanks to lefaym for the excellent and thorough beta.
First Step
“No, I don’t know what time I’ll be back. You’d better just put her to bed, Rhys.” Gwen didn’t like the snappishness of her tone, but then she didn’t like the fact that she was freezing her arse off in a bit of wasteland at the edge of Cardiff instead of being at home reading her daughter a bedtime story. She said her goodbye to Rhys and tried to keep the resentment out of her voice when she heard Carys calling for him in the background.
Pocketing her phone, Gwen scanned the field for her team. Alan and Jess were collecting body parts, Laurence was still placing yellow markers down to indicate possible biological material, and Sarah was doing something with a computer that Gwen knew she’d never understand. That much Gwen had expected. What she hadn’t expected was to see Detective Chief Superintendant Crowthar walking towards her. The police had abandoned the scene as soon as Torchwood showed up. It was so obviously alien that the pair of detectives who’d been called out hadn’t even bothered to open their notebooks. She couldn’t imagine that Crowthar was here to start a turf war.
“Hello, Sir,” Gwen said, surprised. He wasn’t ‘sir’ to her anymore, of course. But it couldn’t hurt to be a bit polite when her old Chief Super turned up. Especially when he turned up at a bog standard Torchwood crime scene with no warning.
“Good to see you doing so well for yourself, Gwen Cooper. Or is it Williams now?”
“I’m still Gwen Cooper, Sir.”Out of the corner of her eye Gwen saw her newest team member heading towards her. She gestured, subtly, for Sarah to go away. She didn’t know why the Super was here exchanging small talk with her but she had a horrible feeling it wasn’t something she wanted her team to hear.
“Thing is, Gwen, what with you picking up where Captain Harkness left off, we’d been expecting to hear about our little agreement. And when we didn’t, well we were going to let you get on with things your way but that doesn’t seem to have worked out too well.” The man gestured towards the mess of blood and flesh that Alan was scooping into a body bag.
“Sorry, David. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gwen said. “Why don’t we talk about it at the station?”
*
“No bloody way. Jack would never have done that.” She knew he would have, though, and it was just one more reason to curse him.
“Look, Gwen, it’s the perfect solution. Your Rift gadget shows you’ve got something nasty on your hands, and we’ve got plenty that’s nasty on ours, so we bait a trap for you and everyone wins.”
“Except the bait.”
“They’re not bloody scouts, we’re giving you. These are seriously nasty people. So yeah, if they do get hurt, no one’s going to shed any tears over them.”
Gwen got up, chair slamming to the floor behind her from the force of her movement. She’d liked the man sitting in front of her. She remembered when he’d arrived from the force in Avon, how she’d thought he was going to clean things up, and all the time he’d been guarding this filthy deal. She stormed out of the station, barely nodding in response to Andy’s hello as she passed.
*
“Are you happy now, then?” Chief Superintendent David Crowthar closed the door of the mortuary behind him as he entered. Gwen had been expecting the coroner so she could check that all the paperwork for the latest victim of the Rift was in order. She found that she wasn’t exactly surprised, though, that it was Crowthar. She’d got a call from him just after the Rift spike, repeating his offer. She hadn’t spoken to him then, just hung up, and she wasn’t intending to speak to him now.
“Look at him, just seventeen. So much ahead of him.” Gwen couldn’t stop herself from looking at the body on the slab. She thought he’d probably been a handsome lad but it was difficult to tell with the stitches holding him together now. “We could have stopped this,” Crowthar continued.
“You don’t know that,” Gwen said. She realised even before she spoke that it was a mistake to respond to him but she couldn’t stop herself.
“There’s something else I want to show you.” He walked over to another slab. She followed, anxious to have this over with. Crowthar stopped and Gwen found herself looking down at the body of an old woman. Gwen didn’t need to read any post-mortem report to see that this wasn’t a natural death . The bruises all over the body told her more than the clinical words of a doctor’s report could have.
“Mrs Carey’s son. He’s a nasty piece of work.” Crowthar said. “We’ve been watching him for a while but there’s never been anything that would stick. He lives in the area your monster first turned up in. If Harkness had still been around, we’d have used him as bait. Might have got to him before he offed his mam. Funny thing is, when you took over that Torchwood racket I asked your old sergeant what we could expect. He thought you’d be no problem. Said you cared about people.”
“Fuck you.” Gwen’s heels smacked against the mortuary floor as she headed for the door.
*
“So you don’t think it was my fault, then?” Gwen asked.
“Course I don’t. Bloody hell, Gwen. How could I? You’re doing your best to keep people safe from aliens just like we’re doing our best to keep Cardiff safe from criminals. We can’t be perfect, we just have to try our best.”
“I know, Andy.” Gwen twisted her hands around the mug of bitter, greasy spoon coffee. She wasn’t going to drink the dreadful stuff but at least the scalding liquid was good for warming her cold hands. “But I can still see them and I can’t help thinking that maybe I could have saved them. If they had to choose between me not having to trouble my conscience and them being alive what do you think they’d pick?”
Andy didn’t answer her. There was nothing he could say but Gwen couldn’t bear to sit in that cafe with the silence choking them and wait for him to work that out.
“Listen, thanks for the coffee but I’ve got to be off,” Gwen said. She didn’t look back as she left the cafe.
When she got home she went to the computer and sent an email. By the morning she had Crowthar’s list.
Quick step
They were a good team, all in all, but she wondered if Owen and Tosh and Ianto had driven Jack mad in the same way. She wondered if she had. For a moment she wished she could apologise.
“Look, I know you’re worried about Jess, I am too, but it’s too dangerous to go in until we know more. Steph is running the scans now, we just need to wait.”
Laurence glared at her, and it seemed like he was going to obey until a scream burst from the building in front of them.
“Gwen, she’ll be dead before we get the results of those scans. Let me go in.”
“Okay.”
Laurence raced towards the warehouse. When the explosion ripped through it there was nothing Gwen could do.
*
Gwen stood beside Rhys and let the words of the funeral service wash over her. It wasn’t the first time one of her team had died. It wasn’t even the first time one of them had died because of one of her decisions. Normally, she’d go home and talk it through with Rhys, picking over every possibility, all the different endings that could have been. This was different, though. This was the first time she couldn’t tell if she’d done the right thing or not. Jess had been one of the coffin bearers, and how could Gwen decide if she’d been right to allow Laurence to risk his life to save his team mate? He’d managed to drag Jess to shelter before the explosion. There was no way she could have moved herself and the mess of Laurence’s remains had illustrated the effect of the explosion on an unprotected body.
“All right, love. You ready to head off?” Rhys asked. The mourners were starting to drift out and Gwen never went to wakes for team members; too difficult to answer questions about how she knew the dead person, too difficult to look at the grieving relatives.
“No. You head home, sweetheart. I have some things I need to do.” She tried not to notice the hurt in Rhys’s eyes. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t feel colder without Rhys at her side.
Side step
“Don’t do this, Gwen. I’m warning you.”
She walked around Rhys and slammed her office door shut. It wouldn’t do much; there was far too much glass in the new Hub to be able to have a truly private conversation but, she felt slightly better knowing her team couldn’t hear every single word of the row she was having with her husband.
“Do you think I’m doing this on purpose, Rhys? That I invited some aliens to come round at the exact same time as my daughter’s nativity play so I could get out of it? Get a grip, man.”
She was furious and so was Rhys. If they had any sense they’d stop now, cool off and then try to have this conversation later. Strange that she could know that and yet do nothing to make it happen.
“Yeah, well sometimes I wonder, Gwen. Whether nativity plays and supermarkets and washing up aren’t just beneath you. The great Gwen Cooper and her important life are so much more worthy than the rest of us.”
“What do you want me to do, Rhys? We’re in the middle of a crisis. My team need me here until we’re done.” And really, what did he want her to do? They both knew how important Torchwood was. There was a pause and Gwen knew this was the chance to make peace, to get this argument under control before anything got broken for good. But she was so angry - with herself, with Rhys, with the fact that she’d come home yesterday covered in blood, showered and stayed up until four in the morning sewing an angel costume that she wasn’t going to see her daughter wearing after all - that she couldn’t stop herself.
“You want to swap places Rhys? I go to the nativity play and you do my job? Expect we both know you wouldn’t last five minutes.”
He pushed the door open so hard it smacked against the wall. Gwen watched from the open doorway as Rhys stormed out of the Hub. He was nearly at the entrance when he turned.
“You might be pretty hot when it comes to shooting things, Gwen, but as a mother you’re a disaster.”
*
She’d been checking her watch every five minutes for the past hour but it hadn’t slowed down time any. Things were nearly under control, another half hour and they’d be home and dry. It was just a shame that the nativity started in ten minutes.
“You should go,” Alan said. “It’s just clean up now. We don’t need the boss here for that.”
“You don’t know that. The whole point of cleaning up the mess is to check there are no nasty surprises.” She should stay, she knew that, but she should also be at Carys’s play.
“Gwen, honestly. Me and Mike know the drill by now, we’ll make sure Danny and Liz are okay. Go.”
Gwen went, still calling instructions over her shoulder as walked to her car.
*
“Sorry love,” Gwen whispered, slipping into the seat beside Rhys. She’d made it with thirty seconds to spare. Rhys turned to kiss her on the cheek.
“Allsort?” he said, holding out the bag.
*
Gwen had left her phone on, of course. But by the time it rang the screams had already started.
*
The dawn chorus was singing when Gwen opened her front door. Rhys was waiting for her with a cup of tea. The whisky in it burned her throat as she swallowed.
Gwen curled up on the sofa, watching the sun rise through the window. Rhys was next to her, waiting for her to speak if she needed to, waiting to tell her that she’d done her best, that no one could have done better. She didn’t speak though. She couldn’t trust herself. It wasn’t Rhys’s fault of course but all she’d been able to think of, talking to the parents of that poor boy, was that she could have stopped it. If only she’d been on the scene from the start and not at that bloody play she could have stopped it all. So she didn’t speak, and neither did Rhys.
The silence was safer.
Step change
She’d known, ever since she’d agreed to the deal with Crowther that it wouldn’t end there. She’d compromised herself once, for the best of reasons she thought at the time. She’d been waiting for the next test for years. So in a way, it was a relief to find Johnson waiting for her in the Hub, a gang of red berets surrounding her.
“Hello, Cooper. We need to talk.” Gwen didn’t know whether to be worried or pleased that she got a greeting. She gestured for Johnson to enter the office and shut the door on the woman’s UNIT flunkeys.
“What do you want?” Gwen asked.
“The same thing you do - to save the world.”
*
Gwen tried to sleep that night. She kept waking to the sound of Rhys’s breathing, blinking her eyes and tying to forget the vicious, viscous red that stained her dreams. She wished, as she had tried and failed to keep from wishing for the past seven years, that this had happened on Jack’s watch.
Johnson wanted a weapon, something that had fallen though the Rift in the year of Edward VII’s coronation, something that was so dangerous Jack had hidden it from the rest of Torchwood, hidden it, kept it secret through two World Wars and countless skirmishes with hostile aliens. It would still be hidden if Johnson hadn’t blown up the old Hub all those years ago, and Gwen couldn’t decide if that was ironic or just a kick in the guts.
She still wasn’t sure, even after Johnson’s explanation, what the weapon did but it seemed like it would save only a little more than it would destroy.
“All right, love?” Rhys asked, face still pressed into his pillow. She wasn’t, of course but she’d tried to keep Rhys away from Torchwood’s filthy secrets ever since they became her secrets.
“Fine, just work.” Rhys didn’t say anything but suddenly she wanted to tell him, wanted to go back to that brief period when there had been no secrets between them.
“It’s just that I’ve got to make a choice, sweetheart. And people are going to die either way, but if I get it wrong there are going to be more deaths.”
Rhys pulled her closer to him, her back against the warmth of his chest. “You’ll do the right thing. You always do.” She knew, now, how little that meant. She’d known at least since the fiasco last Christmas. She thought maybe Rhys was starting to realise as well.
If she was looking at him, she didn’t think she’d be able to say it but here, in the dark, eyes on her bedroom wall, the words came.
“I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Rhys said. It wasn’t but she let the words and the warmth soothe her.
*
In the end she waited to see how things would unfold. It was one of the things she tortured herself with, later. Whether they could have found a different way, if she’d waited longer, or if the death toll would have been lower if she’d acted sooner. But she waited until the first reports came in, until she had a folder full of pictures of jigsaw people that she’d never be able to put back together.
By the time she was ready to leave, weapon in a lead-lined briefcase handcuffed to her arm, the reports were starting to flow out to the public. Rhys was watching a news bulletin when she went to say goodbye.
“What the bloody hell is happening?” he asked, taking in her case and the travelling bag slung over her shoulder.
“You don’t want to know.” She kissed him goodbye.
“I’ll go and get Cerys so you can say goodbye to her,” Rhys said.
“No, just tell her I love her and give her a big kiss from me.” Gwen didn’t want to see her baby until this was all over.
*
She didn’t think she’d ever feel clean again but at least after a shower at the Hub she felt like she could go home.
When she got there Rhys had already packed his bags, Cerys standing beside him in the coat Gwen had bought her for her sixth birthday.
“Rhys, what’s going on?”
“Mam, take Cerys to the car.” Gwen turned round to see Brenda, bloody Brenda, standing behind her. She glared at Gwen and held her hand out for Cerys. Gwen waited until the door closed behind her daughter to ask again.
“Rhys, you tell me what the hell you think you’re doing, right now.”
“I’ve seen the bloody news, Gwen.” He gestured towards the television, footage of the aftermath Gwen turned away before she could get any more than a vague impression of what was happening on the screen. She didn’t want to think about what she’d been doing when that footage was taken.
“Look at me and tell me that wasn’t you lot and I’ll stay.” She couldn’t, of course. There might have been a time when she could lie to Rhys and make him believe but she’d forgotten how to be that person and he’d grown out of being that man.
“What you’ve done, it’s - I don’t even know how to put a word to what you’ve done.” Gwen had never heard Rhys use that tone to her. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him use it before at all.
“Rhys, you don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. But that’s because you don’t want me too.” She didn’t want him too. She didn’t want anyone to understand what it had been like to stand in that cold room, buried in the earth and watch as the dying began.
“Rhys, please. Don’t leave. Don’t throw everything away for this one thing.”
“It’s not just this one thing, Gwen. You know it isn’t.” And Rhys was right again, damn him. They’d been drifting away from each other for a while and she’d been too scared to do anything about it, scared that the swell and the ripples from any action she took would just make things worse.
Rhys walked past her, towards the door and it was too much that after everything she’d given to keep the world together her world was falling apart.
“Don’t you dare walk out of that door Rhys,” Gwen shouted. “Do you think you can just take my child and walk out on me? Six hours ago I was briefing the fucking Prime Minister. You can’t do this to me.”
Rhys paused at the open door.
“For God’s sake, Gwen. I don’t even know who you are any more.”
Stepping stone
She hadn’t seen him since the day he walked out. At least, she hadn’t seen him in the flesh. She’d kept tabs on him, at first. Used the CCTV footage she had access to and checked that he was okay. When she’d picked up Cerys for her increasingly rare visits, Brenda or Barry would be there. Once it became clear that he was moving on, though, it was too painful to watch. Seventeen years on and she still loved him as much as she ever had. Her love was darker, now, mixed with guilt and anger and grief. But it was still love and that made the whole situation unbearable. Rhys was trapped, along with thirty four other hostages in St David’s Shopping Centre.
Torchwood had a policy, of course, of not negotiating with hostage takers, but they’d never been good at following protocol. Especially not when emotions were involved.
“UNIT are never going to let us make this swap, Gwen. What do you want us to do?” Danny, her second in command, passed her a cup of coffee as he spoke.
“Tell UNIT we’re handling it. We’re going in.”
“Sure that’s wise?”
“No,” Gwen said. She really wasn’t, but with UNIT involved there was no way to make a deal, and she couldn’t leave Rhys in there. Not even after he’d left her. She made an effort to smile. “But we’re Torchwood.”
Last step
She was standing over the sink rinsing out her bloodstained blouse when she heard the door slam. Cerys came straight to the kitchen but it was several minutes before she spoke.
“Did you do this on purpose?”
“Do what?” Gwen turned to look at her daughter. “Try to save my husband?”
“He hasn’t been your husband for years.” Legally, they both know that’s not true. Rhys had moved on, true, but for some reason he’d never cut that last thread between them. Gwen wanted to believe it was love but she suspected that it was a last mercy to a woman he had loved once.
“Did you get him killed on purpose?”
Gwen had thought that she was too tired to be angry but Cerys’s words sparked something inside her.
“I bet you’ve been waiting all this time for a chance to get back at him and now you’ve finally managed it,” Cerys continued.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re just a child, you can’t possibly understand -“
“Can’t understand what, Gwen? All the terrible things you’ve done? Because, no. I can’t understand them.”
Gwen clung to the shreds that remained of her temper and tried to soften her voice.
“I know you’re grieving, sweetheart, but so am I. I want to be there for you, to help you.”
Cerys slapped away the hand that Gwen had extended to her.
“Oh fuck off, Gwen.”
“Don’t speak to me like that. I’m still your mother.” Gwen could feel hysterical laugher bubbling up at the absurdity of those words at such a time.
“No. You’re a lot of things, Gwen. But you’re not that.”
Gwen couldn’t think of anything to say as her daughter walked out. She wondered if Jack had felt like this, if he’d been able to see all his missteps, all the turns that had led him to hell. She could, but it didn’t help. Even with all her mistakes laid out like a map before her Gwen wasn’t sure there could ever have been another route for her.
*
Danny,
Don’t bother trying to find me. You won’t. A long time ago I told someone that they couldn’t keep running away. I guess it’s time for me to find out whether that’s true or not.
Try to get out while there’s still something worth leaving for.
Gwen