Title: Lies
Summary: Four little lies that Gwen and Martha have told each other. (Femslash, set several years after Miracle Day)
Rating: M for character death
Word Count: 1042
Other Chapters: No.
Disclaimer: The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Torchwood and all related characters, settings, and trademarks. I do not profit in any way from this material. The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Doctor Who and all related trademarks. I do not in any way profit from the use of these trademarks.
Pairings: Gwen Cooper/Martha Jones; Gwen Cooper/Rhys Williams; Martha Jones/Mickey Smith; Mickey Smith/Jack Harkness
Contains: open relationships
Warnings: character death
Lies are dangerous, in a relationship like theirs. They know that they shouldn't lie to each other, not ever, but sometimes they do.
"He might still make it."
Martha Jones did not lie often. Lies tended to cause more problems than they solved. Not this time, though. Martha watched as two young women in clean green uniforms loaded Rhys Williams into the ambulance, and then she looked at her own bloodstained hands and clothes, and she knew he'd be dead before he got to the hospital. She just couldn't say that to Gwen. It would be nice to say that she hadn't meant to lie, and that sincere emotional irrationality had caused her to disregard everything she'd learned in medical school about wounds like the one Rhys had sustained, so that she was giving Gwen hope that she honestly believed was valid. That was probably what Gwen assumed. It wasn't true. Martha had known that she was lying as surely as she'd known her own name when she'd told Gwen there was still a chance.
Gwen had thanked Martha, jumped into the ambulance, and said her final goodbye to her husband long before they reached the hospital.
Martha still didn't know why she'd lied. She suspected that, deep down, it had been a selfish and perhaps even callous thing to do. It hadn't really spared Gwen's feelings or made the night easier on her in the long run or the short run. It had spared Martha's feelings. Intellectually, she knew that there was nothing she could have done to save Rhys. Emotionally, she couldn't help but feel that if she'd just been a better doctor, she could have defied every law of medicine and made it work. She'd lost patients before, working for U.N.I.T. Rhys was not the first person Martha had attempted to perform a miracle on, but it had never before hurt quite so much to fail. She was watching a friend's life ooze through her fingers in sticky red corporeal form, and she could not admit that to Gwen. When she tried, the words swelled up in her throat until she couldn't breathe.
So she spoke other words. Easier words.
"I'm fine.."
Gwen told that lie to everyone: to Martha, to Mickey, to Jack, to Andy, to her mother, and to her daughter above all, because Anwen needed to know that it was okay to grieve, but there was nothing to be afraid of. Gwen had comforted herself through many late nights at the base with the thought that she was chasing away all the monsters that might hide under her daughter's bed. She couldn't chase this one away. This horrible, oppressive black cloud that hung over her household even on the sunniest of days wouldn't move no matter how loudly Gwen screamed at it, how prettily she begged of it, or how accurately she threatened to shoot it.
Martha could help, though. She was good with kids and she could actually make Anwen smile when her favorite Disney films couldn't. She could make Gwen smile, too, and that got easier the more she did it. Gwen's friends were all around more often than Gwen would at times have preferred, in the days following Rhys' death,, and Gwen's mum had even come to stay with them for a week, but sometimes it felt more like a chore to entertain them than a relief to be offered their shoulders to cry on. Never with Martha, though.
"I've never wanted to kiss a girl that badly before..."
Martha wasn't sure why she'd felt the need to say that. It was completely untrue. She could name three female celebrities off the top of her head that she'd kiss if she could. It had just felt like the sort of thing that a woman was supposed to say after an interesting run-in with a group of sirens. Turns out those songs didn't just work on men. The sirens had pulled them under water, then they'd realized that something was wrong and released them, and Gwen and Martha were left dripping and boatless on the opposite side of the lake from their rental car, and when they got back to their hotel, they'd have to inform Jack and Mickey that this mission was not going to be as easy as they'd expected.
But at least the sirens had decided not to kill them. That was a definite bright side, and it at least seemed to justify the decision to only send the women on this mission.
When Gwen said "I have," Martha hadn't quite known how to respond, so Gwen had casually listed off a few examples: that girl in her French module when she was sixteen. A couple of flings at college. Carys, at least when she was being possessed by a particularly sexy cloud of murderous gas. Martha.
Not that she had kissed Martha, but she'd wanted to.
Martha had blushed, thanked her, mumbled that she was glad to see that Gwen was comfortable talking about these things again (It had been nearly a year since Rhys' death, after all), and started walking back to the car.
"I didn't have plans tonight."
Gwen did have plans, but she was old enough and bitter enough to blow off a visit with her mum because her best friend sent her a text that said that she and her husband had decided to do some experimenting, her husband was going to be out for the night, and she would love it if Gwen could come over.
Gwen knew damn well that Mickey's plans that night were with Jack, and that there was nothing 'experimental' about that for either of them; Mickey'd had a very long and very happy relationship with a boy in that parallel world, from what Gwen had heard. Still, if it made Martha more comfortable to pretend that she wasn't the only one involved who was new to this, Gwen would indulge her. She'd already hired a sitter for the night and her mother could handle a rain check. They'd managed to defeat those sirens without snogging anyone, and Gwen was eager to work some of the residual sexual energy from that experience out with her real first-choice partner.
And she did.