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The first time Gwen wakes up screaming she's at home, and Rhys wakes up beside her with a start; it's a moment before he comes to grips with what happens so he's naked and tense and ready to fight it, whatever it turns out to be, with the cricket bat that she's started keeping in the bedroom. He doesn't question the cricket bat again after that night, but he won't let her keep any of the guns in there.
Rhys is a miracle, Gwen thinks, when his only response to her waking up yelling is to mutter, "Go back to sleep, you daft woman, there are no little green men in here," before giving up and getting up bare-arsed naked in the night to make her an especially milky cup of tea.
He's crude and ridiculous and not always bright, and he's gobby and he eats like a locust and he makes her laugh until she cries, so easily, so easily. And she loves him with a fierce possessiveness that borders on the demented; when he lies across the bottom of the bed and pretends to bite her toes. When he rests his head on her thigh and says, "How many worlds do you reckon there are?" and "Have you met many aliens?" and "What do they look like?" with the eager excitement of a child, unafraid and interested; he knows it's dangerous but he has accepted that Gwen will be okay on trust; Jack told him so. Rhys trusts Jack because Gwen trusts Jack. That's all.
Sometimes, Gwen dreams about him, dead and bloody on the floor and she wakes up, somewhere between a whimper and an anguished yell in her throat, like it was her heart that was ripped from her chest in those dreams. Rhys knows the timbre of her night fears well enough to know this scream requires a hot, silent embrace, not humour and tea.
Because they fit together like that, Rhys and Gwen, his belly against the small of her back like a giant furry animal, his legs against the back of her thighs like a seat. In the miserable moments between waking and the comforting snore in her ear, Gwen's sure of this much, over and over: if anyone tries to hurt her brave, silly, soppy, hot-tempered, funny husband again, no matter who they are, she will fucking kill them.
She's always found it easier to be friends with men, and it's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle, now – the closer she is to men, the less women trust her; jealousy, her Mam said, but it changes nothing about how it feels. Gwen talks to people by touching them, that's just … how things are, and because Tosh so plainly dislikes anyone touching her, Gwen's stuck on the outside.
How to be closer; how to be her friend or at least her confidante or a good team mate; how to apologise. How to say: look, you're beautiful and clever and if you just … stopped mooning over him Owen'd be after you like a shot. If that's what you want – without sounding condescending. Without sounding like she's offering Tosh her leftovers. Without getting it wrong.
Women are hard. Men are easy.
Not all men, admittedly.
Ianto is strange, confusing onion of a man and for a while he's so caustically and obviously broken that she can do nothing but hold her tongue and watch Jack's clumsy, heavy-handed manoeuvring with as much disapproval as she can safely radiate.
He's an onion, all compressed repression and polite shutdowns and personal space, but eventually Gwen gets an arm offered to her, or a hand up when she stumbles (is knocked down, more often; there are things with tentacles and strange legs that throw off her physical equilibrium even if they leave her mental balance untouched these days), and she knows one of those layers has her name on it now; watching him – polite, reserved, and yet somehow intimate – with Tosh, she realises the onion is also a chameleon.
Reserved for Tosh. Invisible for Owen. Open for her. Sarcastic and evasive and slightly flirtatious for Jack.
"I worry about Rhys," she confides, once. There are biscuits – amaretto biscuits that all but dissolve in the coffee – and Ianto isn't sitting down, of course, because he is always too busy for that at the moment. "I come home, I catch myself checking the hallways and the cupboards in case anything's happened, you know? Like someone could have been lying in wait for him – or for me but they got him first. You know?" She swallows slightly too much coffee in one go and almost chokes on it. "I mean, how exactly do you alien-proof a house? It's not like keeping the foxes out of the bins, is it?" She helps herself to a biscuit. "I s'pose you don't really have this problem though, do you – "
The look he gives her is so deep and empty and wounded that Gwen has no idea what to say at all, frozen over the coffee in her hand.
" – with Jack," she finishes, watching him carefully.
Ianto shakes himself and gives her a shuttered, almost bare, smile. "There are other things to worry about with Jack," he says with something that sounds like wryness stuck through a wringer, and something that sounds like regret.
After that she's even less sure she knows him, and less sure she wants to know what hurt, angry thing he has hiding at the centre of tall those funny onion layers.
Owen, she's decided, is her antithesis.
It probably explains why they were drawn to each other – matter, antimatter – and also why she occasionally (frequently) hates him. Even their names – Owen Harper, Gwen Cooper – like distorted reflections of each other, fitting together too well and irritating each other too much. She can't stand the way he has to show how much he doesn't care by making fun of everyone who does, and it doesn't always help to know that it's just his way of coping, just his way of not being afraid.
Obvious, yeah, that if Owen doesn't care about anyone then he won't have to lose someone he cares about, but Gwen can't see how you'd live like that and not go crazy.
On a bad day she'll wonder how she can call any of them, including herself, sane.
And Martha has come along and Gwen was hoping so much that this time she'd connect with another woman and have a friend and Martha is friendly and nice and so incredibly intimidating. She's operating on a different level.
Martha had seen things, Jack says when they're alone, things you couldn't even begin to imagine. The end of space and time. Martha's pretty amazing.
And if this was Jerry Springer or something daytime TV-like, Gwen would have answered with, "I can see that, thanks," and, "wow, thank you, Jack, now I feel completely inadequate, great management there".
But it isn't, and so she angrily drums her fingers on the desk and tries not to blame Martha for Jack being less than perfect again, and tells herself to get a grip, and almost gets one. Almost.
She wakes up screaming about Nostrovite babies, snot blubbering over her chin and fear moving like a foetus inside her, a cheese-on-toast night, and Rhys says with studied lightness that he plainly doesn't feel, "I s'pose that puts the kybosh on Huw and Daphne, then," as if he isn't bothered at all.
And Gwen half-laughs and half-sobs and straddles the line between hysteria and aching sadness, confusing Rhys into an angry frown before she's compose enough to punch him in the arm and say tearfully, impatiently, grateful for his bulk and his bullheadedness and the miracle that keeps him breathing by her side in the night: "Of course I still want your babies, you idiot, I just don't want anything else's."
She's not sure if she's going to laugh or throw up at the idea of Nostrovite Rhys (half-afraid that he's not really him but something else, wearing Rhys as a skin, half-afraid that any minute now he's going to say something that will clue her in on this, and she knows she's paranoid and she doesn't want to be. She doesn't want to be). And she's still secretly so afraid of letting anything move into her belly again that her thighs clench during sex and Rhys worries, angry and concerned, impatient and beset by suspicions that she can no more dispel than he can prove to her that he's really him.
But courage means being afraid and doing it anyway.
That's what Jack told her, and she believes him. He also told her it meant he was never truly brave any more, and she just snorted and pulled a face because it was so ridiculous, ridiculous to say Jack wasn't brave.
"No, really," Jack had said, fashioning a pirate hat out from newspaper and plonking it on his head – they had both been slightly drunk, an exceptionally good nerve-calming whiskey turning into three or four – "I can't get hurt, that kind of rules me out."
And Gwen had given him a very serious stare, as serious as she could manage around the whiskey and the pirate hat, and with the weight of all the things Jack could have lost, must have lost in his life giving her the authority she needed to say it, she had said, "Can't get hurt my arse."
Anyone can see that isn't true; she gets her proof, proof she neither needs nor wants, not long after that conversation. For a while everything hurts too much, too much for her to say or do much but work, work, work.
Jack says she can, should take time off and be with Rhys, but Gwen resists. She resists even though every morning when she leaves him is like tearing a plaster off her heart's ventricles as she wonders – going out the door – if today will be the day she comes home to find him gunshot and bleeding to death … just like Tosh. The moment that will turn everything inside-out and take away someone she hasn't had her time with yet could be just around the corner, and the knowledge tears at her every moment.
Jack offers her Retcon; she resists, and Gwen doesn't think he really expects her to do otherwise. It would be unfair, ungrateful to Tosh, to Owen, to drown out the painful end that came with what they did for Cardiff, for Gwen and Jack and Ianto. It would be so ungrateful. So they work; she works, Ianto works, Jack works – doing what they do, saving the world.
The problem is that Mickey and Martha aren't quite Torchwood, and something in them – in Jack, too – is different. And it leaves Gwen up against a wall, feeling small and out of place in her own workplace, feeling like she doesn't know enough at all –
"You two need to accept that he's not perfect," Martha's voice is firm, authoritative and exasperated. Gwen pauses outside the autopsy room; she was intending to breeze straight on through, but it doesn't sound like the kind of conversation she can waltz through easily.
"I'm not sure I – " Mickey, who isn't going to reach the end of a sentence in this argument.
"You wince every time I say anything that even suggests he might be fallible. You know he makes mistakes."
"We all do." Jack. So they're not talking about him, then. And Gwen supposes they must mean The Doctor, and feels small and uninformed again, and again.
"Then stop treating him like some kind of god."
"That's a very bad habit," Ianto says, right behind her. Gwen nearly jumps out of her skin, so completely engrossed is she in the brief snatches of conversation. "Eavesdropping."
"I was just going to – " Gwen says hurriedly, although she's not sure what she was just going to.
"And," Ianto says, raising his eyebrows, "there is a perfectly good surveillance system covering the entire Hub."
She acknowledges the sarcastic smile-with-eyebrow-raise waved at her like semaphore, but he's already moving, without offering her his arm. She feels obscurely, again, like they're partners in some petty crime; because they're not big enough or important enough to be the major players any more.
"I think the problem –" Gwen says a little breathlessly, as Ianto collected up errant cups on his way through the Hub to his monitor, trying to keep up, "- is we don't have a proper leader any more. I mean, Jack's not acting – "
"I think," Ianto says, moving a window out the way of autopsy-room-surveillance-streaming.flv with the end of his finger (Gwen wonders when he set up touch-screening and why she doesn't have it), "the problem might be that we have too many leaders."
"Come again?" Gwen leans around him.
"You, Jack, Martha – "
"AND I THINK YOU SPENT TOO LONG WITH UNIT --" Jack's voice is tinny on the screen as Ianto drags the sound up.
"—and Mickey. I'm the only one here who isn't used to being in charge and making all the decisions myself. You lot," Ianto says it with disapproval but a certain fondness, Gwen thinks. Hopes, "keep stepping on each other's toes."
Gwen still wakes up in the night, screaming.
Sometimes the Rift has stolen Rhys. Sometimes it spat something terrible and ill-defined out that hurt him or changed him into something else. Sometimes there's something dark and terrible lurking in her body and she can't get it out and she wakes desperate to shower, and shower. Gwen endures these nightmares because she knows it means she isn't a nightmare herself, not yet. She's still human if she's still afraid sometimes.
And, sometimes, she just wakes up sweating and wide-eyed; sometimes Jack says she must leave Torchwood, and she wakes up clutching so hard at Rhys's arm that she leaves bruises on the muscle. Rhys is not impressed.
It isn't always Jack. Sometimes it's Martha. Sometimes it's Mickey. Sometimes Suzie crawls back out of the vault and tells her in low and menacing tones that she isn't allowed to guard against any threat to the city; she isn't allowed to fight anything any more. But it is only the ones where Jack says, "And I'm going to have to take your memories along with that gun," and she knows what she's losing, only those where she wakes up and digs her nails into Rhys.
And now the stick in her hand says "PREGNANT" and she wonders, leaning against the bathroom wall forehead first, who she's going to tell first.
