She dreamed about Mary for the first time that night, and woke up to a now-familiar slick slide between her legs, and a familiar wetness on her cheeks.
She had cried like this in Unit, at first, quiet and without noticing it for minutes, huddled in a corner on the hard dirt. After she realised no one was coming, that there was no one who even knew where she was, she had started screaming, clutching at the steel door, breaking fingernails and her voice in tearing sobs. When no one even came to tell her to shut up, the reality of her situation had truly hit. She had no identity, no citizenship, no name. The loss of her identity had been the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced, selfishly worse than knowing her mother was at the mercy of terrorists.
It was the memory of that fear that hit when she realized what had happened with Mary - not only the loss of love, but the loss of herself in ways that could not be retroactively quantified. The blurring of the lines between herself and everyone else, hearing thoughts and not realising where they came from, if they were hers or someone else's. It was that sick memory that made her forgive Jack before she had the chance to be truly angry - her rescue from prison and his murder of her lover blending together, confused by the unsettling feeling of being slammed back into her own mind, the borders firm and blessedly known again.
She sat up suddenly, forcing her thoughts away from the spiral they were heading into - what was past was past, and she would just put her life back together. She was good at it by now.
Wiping her cheeks with the corner of the duvet, Tosh could still smell a faint trace of smoke, the lingering tobacco scent enough to twist her stomach sharply. She pushed herself off the bed and fled the room, padding on bare feet.
The omnipresent tobacco smell got sharper as she neared the kitchen.
"Hi," Ianto said, almost shame-facedly, as he ground a butt into the over-flowing eggcup sitting on her kitchen table.
"Did Jack send you?" she asked, lacking even the energy to be awkward about her neon-pink robe and slippers.
"Well..." he started,
"Be honest," she snapped. As if it wasn't enough to be humiliated in the Hub!
"He asked me to make sure there was no alien technology left in your flat," he said. "But there was nothing in my orders about waiting for you to wake up, and putting fags out in your kitchen bowls."
She was suddenly furious that he was treating this like any other day, like this was any other alien incursioun, filled with civilians hanging on his every word and action like they would offer some sort of explanation or closure to what they had been witness to.
"And you do everything you ask, do you?" she yelled. "Come in and rummage through my kitchen, my waste-bins, it's all here for you to look through? Is this like any other disgusting little job Jack sends you out on, find this, pocket that, make sure it's cleaned up with no questions asked!"
When he just looked at her, calm facade only slightly broken around the mouth, she was made suddenly aware of her volume, suddenly reminded of the dark trains of thought she'd unknowingly spied on from her wire-strewn desk.
She was opening her mouth to apologize, gaze fixed on her suddenly-absurd slippers, when his hand settled on her shoulder.
"Well," he murmured, "only some of us can be granted girlfriends who don't smoke. And at least yours never actually tried to kill anyone on the team."
And he didn't seem surprised at all when she burst into tears and melted into his shoulder, getting salt and half-formed apologies and explanations down his lapel. By the time she had finished breaking down, he had produced a handkerchief and a catalogue of several obscenely expensive home furnishings stores in the area.
"Jack's not paying," he said, wiping tears from her cheekbone with a calloused thumb, "so feel free to pick out whatever you want."
