Gwen adjusted to life in Torchwood much more quickly than she, or anyone else, had anticipated. Sort of. She didn't exactly jump in feet first after all this weirdness - she still wasn't quite sure the whole thing wasn't some big, elaborate hallucination brought on by scientific testing gone horribly wrong - but after being confronted head on by the extreme weirdness that was the immortal Captain Jack Harkness, well, most everything else seemed tame in comparison. The pet pterodactyl? No problem. Invisible lift? Whatever. The many, many aliens? Easy. If she had any questions, she was told to field them all through Ianto. She felt like she was coping pretty well.
It wasn't coping, per se. No, it was more like refusing to thoroughly process any of the unusual situations she found herself involved with. Something strange and abnormal would occur, the team would waltz into the scene, take control, clean it up, and the whole time, the incident would register on only the most superficial level of her higher brain activity. Shortly following that, it would be pushed to the furthest corners of her mind, where it would wait comfortably until Rhys was out of the house and she had a lot of therapeutic booze. Either that or Owen would bodily drag her to the nearest pub. The system worked. Mostly.
Some problems, however, could not be solved with the magical powers of alcohol. Some things Gwen just could not wrap her mind around. Unfortunately, those were the things that were not discussed, ever. Like, where, exactly, the pterodactyl came from. Ianto wouldn't explain it to her, just smile infuriatingly.
But the most irritating thing was The Hand. The Hand in a jar. The Hand in the jar in the Hub lobby.
Gwen had originally come into contact with The Hand on her very first day at Torchwood. (And once before that, when she delivered those pizzas. The memory was a bit fizzy - Retcon does that.) In a room full of alien gadgets and tools and God-knows-what-else-s, a severed hand in a jar had seemed fairly typical at the time, and she had only spared it a fleeting glance. Truthfully, it would have passed out of her conscious thought altogether had it not been for her first day on the job.
During that whole debacle with the sex alien, Jack had been confronted with a dilemma: save a teammate, or save The Hand. He went for The Hand. Seeing Jack with The Hand out of its projective glass case was a bit odd. He carried it, almost cradled it, really, like it was made of glass, and when he placed it into its new jar, he did so with a kind of reverence that reminded her of the pastor when she had been a kid, of all things. Gwen had attempted to call him out on his apparent obsession with a severed body part, as well as his disregard for human life, but other things got in the way, like the fact that Carys was on a killing spree. She would have forgotten it had Jack put the jar back where it had originally been.
Whether by some cosmic coincidence, or maybe Jack was just giving her a hard time, he didn't. He placed it just opposite her workstation. If she raised her head and looked out over the top of her monitor, The Hand was almost directly in her line of sight, slightly off to the left. It sat there, encased in glass and bubbles, occasionally twitching.
The twitching weirded her out like nothing else.
No one else seemed to notice it, however. Perhaps it was because they were used to it, or their desks were turned the other way. Is that what Torchwood did to you, she wondered. Did it make you completely desensitized to all the weird shit you saw? Or would the weird shit eventually overwhelm you and destroy you, like it had with Suzie? In the spirit of curiosity, and of ignoring uncomfortable questions about her new job, Gwen decided to find out just what the hell was up with The Hand. First things first: reconaissance. Jack probably wouldn't tell her why it was important, but maybe one of her new colleagues knew.
She tried asking Ianto about The Hand. He just shrugged and said, "Ask the Captain," before shuffling off to wash her coffee cup. She tried asking Tosh. Tosh said she didn't know, and hadn't really thought about it. She turned back to her keyboard and threw over her shoulder, "Did you try asking Jack?" She reluctantly tried asking Owen. Owen rolled his eyes, turned back to the alien body he was dissecting, and said, "I've got no fucking clue, but I think our glorious leader wanks with it."
"Thank you, Owen, for that lovely image."
"Look, Gwen. Sweetheart. If you want to find out about The Hand, go directly to the source." He motioned vaguely upwards with his scalpel. "Ask Jack."
Ask Jack. Easier said than done. First, you had to distract him long enough from his cheerfully profane chatter, and then you had to actually breach the topic at hand (not in a jar… Oh God that was terrible) without being too awkward. A Herculean feat, if you asked Gwen, and not one she really wanted to undertake. She wouldn't ever admit it, but Jack intimidated her quite a lot. And so, she valiantly tried to ignore the anomaly of The Hand, to put it out of her mind, to not let her gaze wander too much from her computer screen. But it was just right there! Right in front of her! Twitching away like it was nobody's business!
One day, she summed up her courage and got a closer look. She walked up to the jar on the pedestal and stared a hole through it, as if she expected it to dance for her. It did nothing. She searched for some kind of label, some indication of what it might be. Nothing. It looked remarkably like a normal human hand, and not like an alien's. She couldn't decide if that made The Hand less creepy or more creepy. Its forefinger twitched.
"What are you doing?"
Gwen jumped about three feet in the air. Jack couldn't hide a grin. She could tell it was forced.
Now or never, she thought. She bit the bullet and asked, "Jack. I have to know. What is up with this hand in a jar?" Ooh, too forward? Maybe. His fake smile faltered a bit, and an unreadable look passed over his face. Gwen caught an odd assortment of emotions: bit of bitterness, weariness, maybe, and nostalgia. After a moment, the corner of his mouth quirked up in a manner that was actually genuine.
"What do you think it is?"
Well, great. No answers were to be had today. "Um. I haven't the faintest idea."
He looked her square in the eyes, and with all the intensity that she remembered from their first real conversation, the morning after Suzie's suicide, said, "Forget about it. It's not important."
Well, she would forget about it, if it weren't in her face all the time! She tried to respect his other secrets, but she couldn't let this one go. She just had to know what was the big deal with this severed hand! Luckily for her, she was nothing if not persistent, and wasn't that how she even got the job here? "Jack, I can't. Don't say it's not important - you let that sex alien get away with Carys' body because of it. Clearly, it's very important!"
"It's not important to you," he amended with a little bit of a snarl. He turned away and stalked back to his office. "Just let it go."
Oh, for Christ's - "Jack!" she shouted. He stomped up the stairs, ignoring her. Oh, now he was acting like a child. "If you won't tell me what it is, can you at least move it or something? I can't focus with it staring me in the face!" Distantly, she heard his office door slam.
Gwen sighed, brushing her bangs out of her face. She turned towards The Hand and glared at it, as if that would solve her boss' crankiness and trust issues. The Hand bubbled back innocently. It wasn't going anywhere.
Looks like she and The Hand would just have to learn to get along.