Author's Note: Spoilers through "Combat" (TW 01x11).
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It started with a fight.
It wasn't even his fight. Jon from down the hall was having it out with his girlfriend in the hallway, and Rhys made the mistake of walking through the middle of it. As he fit his key to the lock on his front door, he heard the unmistakable sound of palm meeting cheek.
"You selfish bitch."
Rhys turned at the exclamation, about to intercede, and froze at the look on the girlfriend's face. He blinked, and it wasn't Laura or Lisa or whatever-her-name-was standing there, it was Gwen. But then he blinked again, and it was just Laura. Her eyes were bright with tears, and she was pleading softly. "Forgive me. Please, forgive me."
Rhys shivered, a shadow passing over his grave, and turned quickly back to his own business.
That night, he dreamt of Gwen, her eyes bright with tears and desperation as she begged forgiveness for some unknown sin. He woke alone, but then that was to be expected. She never seemed to be home, anymore.
The dream became a regular occurrence, strangest for its consistency. The dream-Gwen always said the same things "Please forgive me. I need you to forgive me." Over and over, until he was hearing it with his waking ears. He wanted to tell her that yes, he forgave her, anything to make the pleas stop, but he couldn't. In the dream, something always held him back, pulled him away into the darkness before he could forgive.
Gwen said nothing, as the weeks full of dreams crept by; he didn't know if she didn't notice, or if she was giving him space. He didn't really care; for once, he was grateful that she had become as self-absorbed as she was. He mentioned it to Dav, who told him it was just his subconscious expressing concern over Gwen's long work hours. Dav said not to worry about it; the dreams would go away soon enough. They did, but for all the wrong reasons.
Gwen's mobile rang at three in the morning, and woke the both of them. As she stood and walked out to the living room, he caught a piece of the retreating conversation with perfect clarity - one word, really. Owen.
And as abruptly as the dreams had started, the memory returned. Gwen. Whiskey. Sleeping with another man. And then the pleas, the terrible pleading that had haunted his thoughts for a month. Suddenly, it all made a sickening, infuriating kind of sense.
When she yelled from the lounge that she had to go to work, he didn't answer. Couldn't answer. All he could hear was the blood roaring in his ears as she slammed the door on her way out, and it took everything he had not to get up and demand an explanation and call things off right then and there. Because she had lied. She had lied, and she had cheated, and then she had tried to cover it up. There was no such thing as tabula rasa in real life, but she'd gone and claimed just that.
She wasn't home that night. Or the night after.
He got a vague call from her boss about a problem with an investigation on the second day, explaining that she'd be out of town until the weekend. He spent the evening getting very, very pissed, and somewhere around half-eleven he came out the other side of the bottle with that odd insight that can only be found when completely knackered.
Gwen wanted a second chance. Forgiveness and the ability to make things right, to make their relationship work.
He'd give it to her. He'd live with the secrets, and the silences, and the empty bed.
But the moment she lied, outright lied, they were through. No discussion, no apologies, just irreconcilable differences.
Double or nothing, as the saying went, and this time, he was all in.
Finis