A/N: I'd suggest reading Sylvia Plath's poem "mad girl's love song," upon which this is inspired, before reading this. It's amazing.
She wakes with a fearful gasp, pale-skinned hands fisting lilac sheets as her eyes adjust to blurriness and her heart pounds forcefully in her chest. Shakily, her hand fumbles for her glasses and as she slips them familiarly onto the bridge of her nose, she feels something akin to comfort wash over her. This is reality. Not the swirling madness that seems to collect in her head and manifest itself in dreams, not the odd love that she's drenched herself in (a gritty quicksand that clings to cellular flesh but leaves her feeling dirty, breathless, and alone). She pants for breath in the darkness of her flat.
She counts to ten because that's what you're supposed to do. Voices echo in her head and she wonders if it's a remnant of the gift Mary gave her (she doesn't truly believe so). They feel odd, disembodied. She opts for a strong cup of tea and slices of toast with jam. The familiar. She needs the familiar.
A picture of Owen and her together greets her wearied eyes as she heaves the refrigerator door open. A slight hiss and she thinks of freon, thinks of scientific things that were and will never be again (except the periodic table, it makes her dizzy), thinks of molecules and things that aren't but are, like the Rift and the Doctor and aliens faking aliens with pigs. She closes her eyes and counts to ten. She wonders sometimes.
Gwen and Owen greet her later in the morning with nods, and Ianto not at all, and she sits at her station and tries to focus on the day's assignment. Torchwood creaks and groans like every other old building in existence, but she feels them echo through her bones today, the strange old moans of memories that were never hers and never meant to be hers that are breaking through her occipital lobe into her cerebrum, cerebellum (only a matter of time before she became a solved equation). She can't think. She recites the periodic table of elements in order in her head. It'll stabilize her. It always does. She catches Gwen giving Owen a kiss when she thinks no one's looking - it burns in her brain and her eyes feel heavy. Jack wanders over, sets a comforting hand on his shoulder. She wonders how she ever thought Owen would ever do anything with her - Owen always chased women like Suzie and Gwen and feisty brunettes and slutty blondes and she was neither, hovering in-between like a confused lightningbug with nowhere to go but the bug zapper. I think I made you up inside my head. She opens her eyes to stare into Jack's concerned eyes, wonders if he can read her thoughts.
"I'm here for you," he says.
The fuck you are, she thinks. "Thank you," she says.
Sometimes, on Friday nights, when no one calls her up (but she expects them to because it's Torchwood with a capital T to emphasize its importance and they're friends but they're not), she spends it with a bottle of wine (vodka, if she's honest) and drinks until she's sloppy (if mother could see her now), until she flops down on her back, watching the ceiling spiral around and around. The air crushes in on her lungs with a bleakness she can't see, can barely feel, but always, almost always senses, lingering in the corner with the truths that Mary gave her that were always bitter and almost acceptable. She scratches itches that aren't there and it's only later that she realizes her nails have cut her and she's been bleeding. She needs a doctor, perhaps (she tries not to think of the irony). She closes her eyes, counts to ten; the darkness creeps behind her eyes.
She has a shallow-breathed mirage in her drunken stupor, all blurs and possibilities. He always shows up at her flat, always, with a bottle of Stoli in one hand and empty promises in the other. She'll invite him in, she always does, and somehow, he ends up spilling part of his soul to her right there on the couch or the living room floor (the location always changes) and before long, they're both naked in her bed, his lips by the shell of her ear, singing faded lines from an old Dylan song (or was it kissing? do they kiss for hours?). But when she reaches for him, he disappears. She blinks her eyes. Once. Twice. Counts to ten like it matters (but it doesn't, she's accepted that already).
The Rift opens one particularly boring day (because unsuspecting is a great journalistic headline) and their alternate selves tumble through wormholes from parallel dimensions or Einsteinian things that she never took the time to study, never took the time for anything. She tried to learn piano when she was eight-years-old once upon a time. Her parents told her to be diligent, practice heartily and enthusiastically, but music was beyond her (she never understood the foot tapping - keeping time, they said, but she always thought time was kept by people wiser than she). She taps her foot now and sees, doesn't hear.
Their alternate selves are best friends, other!Tosh and other!Owen, and they hold hands and look at each other like there's no one else in the world. She stares jealously, imagining the kisses of a man who, by all rights, should not exist. She imagines a grand farewell between them all; passionate kisses given in a fever, murmurs of "I'll be back" and "Tosh, I love you" and tears, tracking paths down her cheeks like they were the Adirondacks. She'd never been to America - they were going to go together after this. But he doesn't make it. He never makes it (that's how it always goes). The earth shakes, her heart breaks, and in the end, everything's still the same.
She wasn't cut out for this love business, not when breaking hearts is a bigger business and the sky rumbles with broken promises like a constant. She feels like a scalar, no direction and yet continual motion, always varying, and her eyes move from object to object, unfocused. She's never realized the largeness of the Hub before. She clings to false memories of things that never happened, people who never tumbled through the Rift but did, people she loved but who never existed, people who existed that she never loved. She closes her eyes and counts to ten.
Jack. "Are you okay?"
She exhales. "Yes." The perpetual lie. (Owen never looks over.)