I never meant this to be anything but a oneshot (twoshot?), but I was making an omelet this morning and it struck me how very normal it is. So this is more about being normal than about the actual omelet. Sorry about that.
GWEN
Gwen Cooper couldn't make an omelet if her life depended on it. Fortunately, it doesn't, and even more fortunately, she has Rhys. Rhys can make anything in the kitchen, and Gwen is more than happy to let him.
So she sits and watches, with her coffee in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening, and talks to him about her day. He knows about Torchwood now, so while Rhys breaks the eggs into his mother's old mixing bowl and fishes the broken shells out with his fingers she laughs with him about Owen losing a bet and having to wear her high heels around the Hub. Then he dumps the eggs in the big skillet she gave him for his birthday ("Are you hinting?" he had asked) and tells her about the Harwood's driver who was arrested for driving without his trousers on. Rhys, though he looks big and clumsy, moves around the kitchen with quiet competence. Gwen loves competence, loves it in all the people she works with, and wonders why it took her so long to realize that Rhys has it too. He shreds the cheese smoothly, without looking down, and slices the ham into perfect, thin slices effortlessly, never once breaking the rhythm of his story. She once commented on his skill, and he had said, "You just save the world, sweetheart, and leave the real work to me." And it is real work. Se can handle guns and aliens and finding Jack and Ianto half-naked in the hothouse, but Gwen knows she could never gently fold an omelet around its filling without breaking it the way Rhys does. She needs that, needs a real life to keep her grounded.
So when Rhys slides an omelet made for two onto a large plate and hands her a fork, Gwen reminds herself that, for all that Jack has called her the heart of Torchwood, she'd lose her humanity without this, this normal life. And the omelet, as always, is perfect. Just like Rhys.