"You're kidding!" Martha exclaimed. "You're seriously telling me you've never kissed Jack?"

Gwen shook her head. "Nope." Not a real kiss. A chaste touch of the lips, once, that was all. And snogging him while he was dead definitely didn't count.

They were sitting on the steps of the Hub, waiting for Jack and Ianto to return from their latest Weevil hunt.

Martha gaped at her. "I thought everybody'd kissed Jack at some point or other. Or he'd kissed them. Hard to avoid it, I'd say." She thought back for a moment, calling up the memory of a few months ago. "Right, well. Kissing Jack Harkness. I've gotta admit, kissing him is -"

Gwen held up one hand sharply to cut her off. "Don't. I don't want to know." She stared down at the concrete steps beneath them. With a sigh she softly admitted, "I can't bear to know."

Martha looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded sagely, and with a touch of melancholy. "Yeah, I get it. I'm sorry. I guess we're in the same boat, you and me."

Gwen looked up. "How do you reckon that?"

"We're both in love with a bloke who doesn't love us back. Me with the Doctor and you with Jack."

"No, not the same," Gwen replied, a little too quickly. "I'm not in love with Jack."

Martha snorted. Laughter shone in her eyes. "Please. Tell me another one."

Gwen's eyes slid away from hers. She wanted to deny it. But she couldn't.

"Anyway," she added after the silence stretched on too long, "You're still wrong. I do think Jack loves me."

Martha eyed her curiously. "What makes you say that?" she asked softly.

Gwen bit her lip. "The way he protects me. The way he looks at me when he thinks no one is watching. All the little things he doesn't say."

"Mmmm," Marta mused, her brain busy trying to get this new information to compute. "Ok, but if you love Jack and Jack loves you, why did you marry Rhys?"

"Because Rhys loves me too. He's always there for me. He always has been. Through thick and thin, all the long nights and monsters and alien invasions. He puts up with everything, all the shit that comes with this kind of life, and he loves me anyway."

Martha pretended to consider. "Wait, then - let me get this straight. You married Rhys because he's a normal bloke who puts up with your crazy job? Doesn't exactly sound like the love of a lifetime." She let a moment pass and then asked, "How does being with Jack make you feel?"

Gwen sucked in a deep breath through her nose. She could see where the conversation was headed, with all the inevitability of a train wreck. Yet she was powerless to stop it. She wasn't sure she wanted to stop it. For so long now she had kept everything bottled up inside. "He makes me feel so special," she confessed in a low, wistful voice. "Like I'm his sunrise and sunset, the only person in his world. And so protected. Cherished. No matter how bad things get, when he's around I just know everything's going to be all right. Living this sort of insane, crazy life, sometimes I need that so much. When he disappeared last month, Martha...god, I wanted to curl up and die."

"Does Rhys make you feel like that?" Martha asked after a moment.

Gwen dropped her eyes. "No," she said in a voice so quiet that Martha had to strain to hear her.

"But you married him anyway."

There was no answer as Gwen continued to stare at the floor.

"If it was Jack who had asked you to marry him instead of Rhys, would you have said yes?"

Gwen's head rose. An indefinable sadness shone in her luminous grey eyes. "He would never have asked. He's too much of a gentleman." And damn you for that, Jack Harkness, she thought. "He knows how important it is to me to have a life outside of Torchwood. A normal life, with pub nights and tax bills and breakfast in bed. Maybe even a baby, someday. And I know he wants that for me. No, he'd never ask."

"Well then, ask him."

"Martha, I'm married!" Gwen protested.

"You can get un-married. You know that isn't the point."

"I can't. I just can't."

Martha shook her head. "I think you're mad. If I had the opportunity to be with the Doctor, loving him and knowing that he loved me back... God it would be so worth it! Even if it was only for a day."

"If the Doctor loved you back."

"You've already told me Jack loves you," Martha pointed out.

Gwen fiddled with the fringe on her jacket. "I said I think he loves me. I don't really know for sure." I don't really want to know for sure, she admitted, but only to herself. "What if I'm wrong?"

"What if you're right? Why don't you find out?"

"How?"

"You could try kissing him," Martha said dryly. She rose and walked down the stairs, shouldering her backpack.

Gwen closed her eyes. She didn't have to kiss him to know how good he would feel, how good he would taste - how good they would be together.
But they couldn't be together forever. He would live on, while she would wither and die before his eyes. If he really loved her the way she thought he might, the pain of it would tear him apart. She couldn't bear the thought of that. "I can't," she repeated softly.

Martha checked her step at the cog door and turned back. She shook her head. "Like I said. Mad."

FIN