cyus | Fic: "Something Beautiful"

Title: Something Beautiful
Characters: Gwen Cooper, Jack Harkness
Rating: PG
Length: 4500 words
Summary: After Torchwood, after Jack, Gwen lives her life, even as Jack comes back.
Notes: written for

writerinadrawer. Beta'd by

51stcenturyfox.

The place is noisy. Cheap pop music comes over the speakers, and, louder than that, the chatter of a group of girls pressed to a corner of the cafe, chairs grabbed from neighbouring tables to form a fort of their own. Shrieks of laughter emanate from there as Gwen Cooper navigates around two suited men, likely assembly members, to make her way to the front of the line.

"Gwen!" James nods to her, still scribbling on the cup for the order before hers.

Gwen is studying the selection of muffins she doesn't particularly care for and the shortbread that she does. Rhys is going to kill her if she dawdles too long. She can imagine him now, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, foot on the accelerator and darting eyes.

"Gwen," James calls again, catching her eye.

Gwen gives him a courteous nod in return. The girls giggle when one of them raises her voice, and Gwen instinctively turns her head to them, then back to James. "Venti vanilla latte, venti double chocolate," she says with a smile.

Their orders haven't changed and neither has the shop or even the girls hogging the tables after school and on weekends with the latest gossip. It's so much the same she's afraid to turn her head to the reconstruction still in the Bay. The explosion scrapped the pier and Coffee Mania!, and how ironic it took the small shop and left the monopoly of coffee to Starbucks, likely all a matter of place and time like the rest of it.

"All is well?" she asks James, watching him ring her up.

"Oh yes, they're talking to reopen the quay big? Have you heard?"

She shakes her head briefly, but gives James an encouraging smile. He takes it to go on about the process, and she shouldn't think about it carefully, why they stopped for this shop, why this and not the one in the city or the one over at the Link, they could have just passed,-

"-tion, and then they'll cap it over there." James points out towards the Bay and then she looks across, mid-thought, like you do.

It doesn't hurt, strangely, the signs of construction, construction cranes and floating pieces of concrete and metal reinforcement. A few areas are still cordoned off, UNIT written all over the Keep Out signs without the bold military letters once printed. They are still looking for buried treasures that didn't get pulverised, and her stomach turns at the thought of how much down in the archives could kill the entire planet and how she prays it stays locked down there forever.

They'd let her in. She hasn't tried.

And now that she's looked she can't look away, and, thinking of Rhys and Harriet in the car, her small fingers clasped around his thumb, she can't help but think of Ianto and Jack and Tosh and Owen, and how Torchwood has been her family that got torn apart and burned in too many flames and lost moments.

She'd resented those steps down into the darkness when the sun was coming out for a peek and a play for once, and she'd resented how it was Jack's home and how Ianto had resigned himself to it like he would have to everything, how Tosh seemed to accept it as something better than whatever the alternative would have been and Owen, how he'd looked like he hadn't cared and still lived in a flat that was all windows (as if that didn't show how alien that place really was). Jack had hated all of them a little for every time they connected like humans, and loved them a little for the alien gestures and cold eyes, and she hates all of them a little now that she is still standing at this abyss of destruction and renewal, where they are rebuilding something that no-one would understand, and they'd all gone and left her to it.

"It's still strange, sometimes," James says and breaks through her silent reverie. "I come in to work and think I've moved on and suddenly, like Snakes & Ladders, there's the ring of the explosion and I'm back two steps after Start and it takes a moment before I remember."

Gwen shakes her head because talking to the retconned leaves the bitter taste of fabricated terrorist attacks, and her sympathetic smile catches on the edges as she tries to keep it right there on her face and steady for all their sakes. One of the girls pushes past her on the way to the toilet, red and blue and yellow colours in her clothes and a smile as another from her table calls something to her.

"Got to climb," Gwen says and pushes over the notes to pay for the coffees.

James nods and hands over the change. "Good seeing you, Gwen."

Gwen moves to the end of the counter and her mumbled reply gets lost in an answered phone call of someone in a suit. Behind the man's head, out through the windows of the small shop, a yellow crane is turning another piece of concrete to cordon off the wall.

It's been not quite a year since Jack, eighteen months since Ianto, two years and counting since Tosh and Owen, and Rhys is still there, and Harriet is still there, and she is getting a coffee in the Starbucks at the edge of it all -- as if she lacks the images in her head and has to force herself to be here in person to understand.

"Venti vanilla latte, venti double choc, love," the boy behind the counter says with a bored tone and sneaks a glance at the table of girls that sneak glances at him and giggle. He brushes back his hair and blushes behind the steam nozzles and espresso presses and Gwen gives him a smile he doesn't quite take note of.

"Be seeing you, Gwen!" James calls out over the thrum of a customer's order and she nods.

To be honest, Canton is out far enough to make it easy not to come anymore without thinking it the grand excuse. A soldier pushes past her, hands red with cold and their eyes meet for a second. She knows him from the day-long debriefings in the wake of that, by face at least. His eyes skirt over her face, a flash of recognition, hesitation and then an aborted salute.

She shakes her head and pushes out, keeps her eyes on the pavement, and on the chairs and on the green and white railing dressing, then turns sharply, and whatever has been the Bay and Cardiff and home is at her back. Rhys stares at her through the car window, a little concern in that draw of his eyes. The coffee sloshes in the paper cups. He opens the door for her and she slides in.

Harriet gurgles in the backseat.

"They're," she gestures out through the window, "they're cleaning up."

Rhys, bless him, nods and takes the coffee from her. She doesn't elaborate, even as he puts the car into gear and takes them out for a weekend away. She doesn't say, they're cleaning up, and no-one remembers. She doesn't say, they're cleaning up, and no-one knows. She turns to Harriet, and she doesn't say, I love you but how can I look at you and not remember what I lost.

She catches Rhys's eye and the way his jaw tightens: he knows. He's always known. And she hates that there is nothing she can do to make it undone.

–

"My name is Jack," Jack says with a grin.

Harriet is seven and should know better than to talk to strange people in strange clothes that appear out of nowhere at the local playground in a small village far outside Cardiff where unemployment is high and the local pubs are filled after work with the ones that haven't made over to England. That's what Gwen had taught her, she should know better even if she's not old enough to know that the pub's where her Da goes whenever he's not home.

Harriet is old enough to eye Jack with distrust even as she plays with the chain of the swing and slowly draws it back and forth.

When Gwen Cooper turns around the side of the street, comes past the hedge, she expects the coat to go with the voice but Jack's lost that as much as he hasn't lost anything else. He looks up to Gwen and straightens when she walks onto the playground. She wants to kiss him. First thought to come to her mind, she wants to kiss him because he wouldn't taste of alcohol and he wouldn't taste of choices made.

Harriet looks between them, from Jack to Gwen to Jack and then back at the chain of the swing between her fingers.

"I'm back," Jack says, trademark chuckle in his voice.

Gwen shakes her head. "Go away. Just go." She takes Harriet by the hand to draw her away.

"I'm back, Gwen."

"To count the survivors or count the suicides, Jack?" Gwen's voice is harsh, the way police work turns it, the way aliens matter less when you are out in the country and you just ignore the reports in the paper because it's none of your business. And then go and cut them out, secretly, until a drunken rage and a shouting match litters them like debris across your floors. Because she can't, couldn't do that anymore, but if she was ever capable of a lie it was that she didn't care about the girls with the bruises and the boys with the knives. She couldn't but she's trying to act it when she goes into work on another shift and Rhys is in bed or in the pub or actually trying, standing at the stove and cooking lunch for Harriet.

"I'm sorry," Jack says.

"It doesn't solve this," and Gwen lets go of Harriet's hand to walk right up to Jack and say, "it doesn't bring him back, Jack. He's still dead."

Jack doesn't even flinch. Gwen doesn't ask how long it's been for him, because the rest of them don't have the chance to jump between threads of time and unravel ladders into snakes; some of them had to walk this bloody path step by step.

Lucy from across the street is watching, and Sian from two houses over. Gwen's lips set into a smile. They'll talk, and Ian at work will bring it up when they swap bad coffee in the work room and she'll laugh it off and secretly wish it had happened just once, just so it's true.

Jack is watching them, her and Harriet, like they are his excuse for a family now.

"I'm not him," Gwen says, and reaches for Harriet again. "I don't crawl into your coat and give up everything because I think that surely it must be better than what I have. Don't ask me to walk away."

She doesn't say that she wants him to take her away and take her down to that place in the ground to maybe feel safe.

Jack pushes his hands into the pockets of his trousers. "The rift's still active."

Gwen shrugs. "UNIT has, we get calls sometimes up here, that UNIT-" but she shrugs and doesn't say it. She doesn't want to think of the Hub rebuilt and those walkways they've walked miraculously there again.

"They'd leave it to me, Gwen. I'll recruit David and maybe Mica when she wants to, and possibly Andy, and-"

"Ianto's-"

"David, he's-"

"Haven't you destroyed enough lives? Haven't you destroyed enough of that family that you need to take their children now?"

"He's good, resourceful, fierce."

Gwen shakes her head, draws Harriet away, down those badly cobbled streets with grass growing between the pavement.

"Harriet, too, if she wants to, in-"

Gwen turns. "You don't get to take our children, Jack. You don't get to come in here and take what is ours all over again."

"I want to make things right." He draws his hands out of the pockets of his trousers and lifts them like a construction crane over the Bay, carrying invisible concrete to fill the holes and build dams and keep water from bubbling inside. Building something new to hide all the shame and the scars of something old.

"You'd even take Gray if he hadn't turned to dust, wouldn't you? You'd take my unborn if it was there," and Jack's eyes flicker enough to prove her words true. "You don't get any of them. Don't even dare go to Rhiannon and ask her, don't even dare approach any of them, Jack Harkness. You lost every chance when-"

"I had to leave, Gwen-"

"-you lost every chance when you had to leave."

A lorry drives past and robs them of words for a moment.

"I would have taken Steven," Jack says, "trained him, made him..." he trails off.

Harriet presses close to Gwen and Gwen shakes her head. "And I just bet Alice was terrified of that. We are not your soldiers, Jack. We are just this, just human. This world doesn't work like this. And they are all dead and no-one, no matter how much they look like him, is him, and no-one is anyone else you lost. We all lost them, Jack. All of us. You can't just recreate us from nothing because someone shares our genes."

She waits for an explanation that tells her she is wrong.

He lifts his chin. "I can show them something beautiful, like I showed you." His eyes carry the words like they are the only truth he believes.

And Gwen Cooper turns from that man with the handsome face, from those eyes and that coat that's missing and still there. She would have given her life for him once if he'd ever asked her to, but not now. She draws Harriet past the small grocer's, and the post box that is only emptied once a day here even along the main road. Harriet stumbles after her, sandaled feet making slapping noises on the stones, and keeps turning for the man who stands at the mouth of the alley, in that backdrop of rusting playground ruins and an uncharacteristically blue sky.

Gwen Cooper wishes she could run, and for a moment, loosening the grip on her daughter's hand, she is halfway there to letting go and leaving her with Rhys and be like Ianto and choose a life that cuts all those ties to a real life above ground. For a moment she wishes there weren't parents to visit and parents to be, and she wishes Rhys wasn't drinking in a pub and instead reminded her what she'd be giving up, because someone could show her something beautiful.

It's only the cobbled stones that keep her from turning. It's only Harriet's chattering voice of ma, and the most stupid, Sian watching from behind the curtain and Gwen not wanting to give her another reason to talk off her mouth about their family.

Jack is watching and Gwen wishes she could turn to him and have him allow her to run away like he had all of the others. Then Harriet tugs her forward.

–

Gwen stands at the window of their semi, keeps the curtain brushed back and watches those strange lights one night, and weevils the next, and even watches zombies that one time before UNIT quite notices what they have on their hands. A cup of coffee in her hand, she sometimes manages not to think of Ianto, but most of the time she does, especially when she glances at the notebook of occurrences and her handwriting. She's hidden it under the sofa cushion, but Harriet looks at her strangely sometimes.

She sips the coffee and it's quite good enough, but she wishes Ianto was there to share a smile over it. And she turns on her computer and thinks of Tosh and goes to the doctor's and thinks of Owen, inevitably.

Harriet comes from the kitchen, a slice of bread with jam in her hand. "Having one of those days, ma?" she asks, leaned against the doorframe. She's going out later like every weekend. Her mate's got a license and they are driving into Cardiff for the clubs.

Rhys has left, and it still feels like she failed him, like she should have been the better person and moved on from it somehow but she never has, saying Jack too often and I love you not often enough in words or gestures or even pretence.

Gwen gives Harriet a smile and lets the curtain fall back. "No aliens tonight," she says. "Is Johnny driving?"

Harriet gives a nod and catches the jam that tries to make it off the slice of bread with her tongue. "Showing off, he is. You should see him in the Globe then, hanging in the corner as the boys from the city show off."

Gwen nods. "Call when you get there?"

"Ma." Harriet rolls her eyes and her thumping steps make it up the stairs to her room.

The truth is, when Gwen stands there at the curtain and looks out into the night, she's always afraid to find Jack Harkness standing outside, ready to take her child away with the promise of something unimaginable and wonderful, or maybe take her if she hopes hard enough.

There's been talk. And she knows he's back in Cardiff, with David and Mica, maybe both, and she wouldn't put it past him to be taking David down to a room to show him love amidst the rotten darkness of the world. It's a little sick how right it feels.

"Be careful," she calls up again. Harriet doesn't remember the man in the coat that didn't want only ten percent of their children but all of them to defend the earth or maybe just to build a private sanctuary for someone who couldn't ever let go, a live museum in a room with no windows.

Minutes pass as she is staring out into the night, and Harriet walks past her and presses a dry kiss to her cheek, a promise on her lips. Johnny pulls up in his car and Harriet slides in amidst laughter, and Gwen is watching until the tail lights make their way far away.

It leaves Gwen's house in silence then, leaves her staring at the headlights flickering past her kitchen window from the street beyond that way. This is how she went from not enough time for a clear thought to too much time for a clear thought. The coffee machine gurgles in the kitchen. The light cuts a clear corridor into the living room.

She's glad now that there are no photos of visits to the pub, or awkward group shots in front of signs or on stairs for the sake of an archive with their birth and death dates added in marker by the archivist.

Torchwood.

The only place that exists now is her memory; it isn't in photos, it isn't written on any scrap of paper, but sometimes, in the middle of the night when she is on shift with Ian and huddled in the cold as they observe someone's restraining order, she catches herself with a smile on her lips as she remembers the long hours in the SUV with Ianto and the coffee from the thermos, swapping stories about Jack to pass the time.

Cock sizes and adventures in bed, and she contributed something about Rhys and her to keep it fair and like they were both sharing something vital. A stolen kiss when the light had been out in the SUV, and they'd missed a weevil and never talked of it. She could taste Jack on his lips, and he'd said he could taste something like a life out there. When she'd waited at the cog door he'd shaken his head and crawled down to sleep in Jack's arms.

Whatever happened that day, it's nothing Ianto hadn't chosen. And Gwen hates Jack most of all because he'd let him, he'd let all of them choose when he knew it would kill them.

Those memories by coffee machine, by stationery, by stray word and moon light, they are still there. Gwen's mobile buzzes. She thumbs it open, and it's Harriet telling her that they've made it to Cardiff safe and not crashed the car, ma.

She feels guilty now she ever thought to leave her.

She feels guilty now she still thinks to leave, but how foolish when she wants to leave into her memories. She misses Ianto and Jack and Tosh and Owen and all of then. She misses climbing the ladders with them and dangling from snakes' tails by the tips of her fingers.

Her shift starts soon. She hopes Jack leaves her daughter alone in Cardiff tonight, he has been good so far, and maybe David will make him happy, or Mica, and maybe Rhiannon doesn't mind.

Likely, she doesn't know. That's Torchwood.

–

Gwen thinks she should have chosen a more dramatic moment for herself to be buying a coffee in the Starbucks, a near-death experience of closure. But the Starbucks goes by a different name, bought by a bigger company as such things go, and if her life is near-death then she doesn't know. As she walks into the shop she has to squeeze around a group of giggling girls and boys, their chairs drawn tight around one of the tables in the corner as they debate politics and philosophy over hot coffees and laughter.

Gwen stands in line and eyes the shortbread, then glances up at the display of coffees, a guilty smile as it's her turn and she orders a large vanilla latte. After all these years, she still thinks of Ianto's frown of disbelief when he caught her with a Starbucks cup she couldn't hide quite fast enough, and she'd been doomed to fetch her coffee from there for all of that week, had it eat a hole into her spending money.

"There you go, love," the boy at the counter tells her as he pushes over her coffee. She takes it with a smile and pushes past the businessmen, bluetooth buttons in their ears, to walk out.

The Bay is vibrant again. It looks not much like she remembers, no piers, but she's seen it on photos in the paper; it's not that different. A little maybe. Rhys called her to say hello a few weeks ago and they've spoken for an hour, the first time without accusations and dark undertones of disappointment. Harriet's stayed at his in Cardiff for a few weeks.

This holds no trace of Torchwood any longer. Gwen can't resist leaning over the railing to glance down to where the tourist office entrance would have been, but that is gone and water laps against hard concrete there now.

"We are up by the castle now."

Gwen manages not to flinch, just nods.

"Are you still in Treherbert?"

"Like you don't know," Gwen says, but can't keep that smile to herself, that comes so easy without, well, without too much of a hint of bitterness. She turns and faces Jack over the paper cup of coffee. "Like you don't know," she repeats after a sip.

He stands too close, and his fingers, as he brushes the hair from her face, are too soft, and he's too young, but that's not surprising, of all of them.

She tries to think if she wants to ask, but finds she doesn't. Then, "how long, when you came to see me, how long since-"

He looks past her to the Bay, and she wants to straighten his shirt and put everything in order.

"You don't want to know," he says.

"Afraid I'd call you a coward?" She shrugs, but has never been one to pull her punches. "Longer than a lifetime or you wouldn't be here," she guesses.

Jack gives no reply.

"You're a coward." None of them had had the benefit of playing the game with skewed dice.

"I'm back. There's an opening-"

She cuts him off before he gets out the words and takes her coffee and steps around him. "I made my choice, Jack, I'm making my choice. I'm not Ianto or Tosh or Owen, I'm not full of ideals or despair or no choice. I would have followed you into death then." She turns to look at him. "I'm not following you into it now, or ever or-"

"Gwen-"

"I read the papers. The incidents, multiplying, increasing intensity, is this when everything changes, Jack?"

Jack has the decency to look her in the eye. "Harriet's grown, Rhys is-"

She smiles, a little crooked, as it catches on the plastic of the coffee's lid as she sips and savours and swallows. "I'm not expendable." She glances past him at the Bay.

"That's not-"

"I have a family, Jack, I don't know where you got them from, any of them, but I've never been like them." She looks right at him, and she shakes her head. "And you know it, you always did." She turns fully then, walking away across the new plass, with her paper coffee cup in her grasp and the coffee sloshing against the plastic lid. She wants to run away for him but she isn't thirty now or thirty-five, and she isn't this lost in this world to still want that.

Her mobile is ringing and she picks it up with her hand, the old fashioned way, foregoing the bluetooth knob.

"I accepted the offer, ma!" Harriet exclaims in her ear. It's a job with the Royal Navy, and Gwen would have been happier if her daughter hadn't been this much like her, but it'd be good for her, an opportunity.

"Congratulations," she says into the phone and other things, and when she looks over her shoulder Jack is still watching, but he doesn't have her, and he doesn't have her daughter, and now she wonders sometimes how she could have ever wanted to slip into bed with him, to slip into his secrets.

He salutes her from afar, and she looks to the water tower they've rebuilt and salutes all of them in turn, Tosh and Owen and Ianto, and maybe herself a little. They've done good, if only all those figures still stood on the board to roll the dice.

Harriet tells her about the newest boyfriend and Gwen forces herself to listen as she leaves the plass behind, and Torchwood, and Jack, for good.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

teaboyfan.livejournal.com

Maybe one reason nobody collects their pension in Torchwood is that grown-ups won't fall for the recruitment pitch. There's a reason the army drafts 18-year-olds. I like the way Gwen remembers the younger self that would have died for him, but has moved beyond that, and the way she can remember everyone she's lost without tearing herself up any more. This impressed the hell put of me when I read it in WIAD, and it still hits hard.

From:

Fic: "Something Beautiful"

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags