This is the second instalment in the 'Days' series, but it's not dependant on having read that.
Grief isn't a tidy thing. Owen's grief, in particular, tends to be messy and disorganized.
Some people – a certain individual with a coffee fixation springs to mind - swan through life as normal, restricting their emotions to anniversaries, birthdays and the like. Making an appointment with mourning. Not Owen. His pain doesn't run to schedule. He doesn't grieve only when the calendar says it's appropriate. He doesn't fit the misery and longing into a nice neat twenty-four bundle that everyone else marks in their diaries.
It happens when it happens. Makes him a tad unpredictable, he has to admit, but that's not a bad thing. If you're all over prickles, like a thistle, people don't try to get close, and rarely try to touch. At least, they don't touch the parts that hurt.
So no, it's not a date in the calendar. It's so many other things.
It's stopping right in the middle of chatting up a sure thing, because the drink he's offered to pay for turns out to be one of those horrendous vodka/cranberry pink things that she always made Owen buy when they had friends over.
It's waking up beside a random shag only to find, in the clear light of morning, that she's got the exact same shade of hair. Or the same eyes. Or sleeps with her hands folded just that way.
It's dropping a scalpel in the middle of an autopsy because once he's washed off the blood from the Weevil attack; he can see that the victim has a mole in the exact same place. He stares at the darkened patch of skin on a nameless, lifeless body and remembers. Remembers how even the lightest brush of fingers or lips just beneath that spot won him a breathless giggle that went straight to his heart. Not to mention his groin.
It's walking through a department store, likely as not looking for the alien hiding in the fitting room, and the world falls apart when one of those odious women in a sash shoves a scented card into his face. Owen knows nothing about the perfume industry and cares less, but in that second he discovers that Katie's favorite perfume is enjoying retail resurgence.
He used to know the name of it; he bought a bottle every Valentine's day after all. Now it's just another detail best left at the bottom of a glass.
But the glass, the forgetting, has to wait on Torchwood's leisure. Finish the autopsy, catch the alien, put the latest victim back together, patch up a team mate. Snark and sneer as if he's still in one piece, as if there wasn't a scream trying to escape along with every word. Leave the pain to burn at the back of his throat, along with the tears, until he can get home. Alone.
This is where it becomes just that tiny bit routine, because however it starts, this is how it ends. With Owen on his knees in the wardrobe of his spare room. And beneath his knees and flowing over his hands and pressed against his face, the velvet.
Flowing folds of velvet, lined with silk. As it caresses his cheek Katie throws aside the bridal magazines and announces she has no intentions of looking like a meringue on her wedding day. She's too old for that, she says, just to make him tell her again how she looks as young as the day they met. No tulle, no organza, not for Katie. Not her thing. No net petticoats, no hooped underskirt. Something simple, refined, classy.
So, the velvet. Soft, creamy velvet, smooth as her skin used to be. Clinging to her curves and sliding down her body like a waterfall. God, she looked beautiful, the day it came back from the dressmaker and he walked in on her trying it on.
Bad luck to see a bride in her dress before the wedding day. Superstition, maybe. Or maybe if he'd listened to the old wives tales, he'd have ended up with a wife who had a chance of growing old.
The velvet is soft, still, but creased from being unpacked and refolded. And it's darkened from white to cream to something almost yellow, though he prefers to think of it as gold, because he can't bear to get it stored away properly. There's a savage slash in the fabric down one seam, from the time Katie found it on a bad day, and the dementia led her to pick it apart so she could 'make a better one.' Owen remembers that day too bloody clearly. Later, in one of the ever-decreasing windows where Katie was Katie, they'd cried over the butchered dress as if were alive. Sobbing over it, both of them, as if it was flesh and blood she'd torn apart instead the seams of a dress they both knew in their hearts she'd never wear.
Those were the first tears to stain the dress. Owen adds more, every time.
It's usually the sight of the latest crop of tears darkening the fabric that brings him back to his feet. If there's any ritual to this thing at all, this is the point where the grieving ends and the forgetting begins.
Vodka, in her memory, but Owen doesn't stuff around with cranberry juice.
Hope you enjoyed. There will be a second chapter, not sure when.
(For anyone thinking 'Where the hell is the next Breaking my heart chapter?' – this piece seems to have smashed the writers block so there should be something this week.)