Gwen sees the world in shades of purple and blue and red. Not exclusively. Green lurks on the surface, and if she focuses hard enough, she can see everything else. The colors are sharper when she doesn't, though, more vibrant. More real, if real wasn't a relative term—human eyesight is just as real as her natural one.
Jack is grey. Not fully, but sometimes. Grey and blue and gold, mixing together, the colors overwhelming each other. How a man can be both an empty grey and a vibrant gold is beyond her, but there it is. She sees it—then it must be real.
Real is relative. Tosh and Owen are normal. Even Suzie, however long Gwen's known her. Black creeped over her form but was always overcome in the end, even in her final moments. That's the tragedy of it.
Rhys is brighter than most.
Not too bright.
Still ordinary. She loves him for it. She fell in love with a human, an ordinary human, a haulage manager, who went to university and had a strained relationship with his parents, and hung out with the lads on weekends. He's normal, and even when she was a copper, Gwen clung to him. Now that she's at Torchwood—an organization that's arguably stranger than her native segment of the world—she clings even more.
Rhys is brighter but still human, and she loves him for it.
She loves him for a lot of other things too.
They begin with his cooking. Gwen can't cook. They end with his touch, physical and emotional intimacy all at once, with his eager questions but endless patience.
She loves Rhys. He's familiar, interesting only in the way well-loved things are.
Ianto isn't.
Ianto is silver and purple and pink all at once, the colors fighting against each other when Gwen focuses on him, so bright that she has to look a way for a second. He's red most of all, sad and in pain and halfway gone already. There's something inhuman about him; the colors don't swirl around him, don't stick to his body in clean, fluid motions, but jar against her vision and make her turn away when she gets dizzy.
If the world is a clear, quiet wood, Ianto is a roaring engine, tearing it down.
She avoids Ianto during her first few days.
She doesn't think about his high-buttoned shirts and thick suits, doesn't pay attention to the speed with which he passes out their drinks, hands appearing and disappearing with a blur too quick for human eyes to process. Gwen catches them out of the corner of her eyes, pale flesh and something else she can't identify. She focuses too hard and her eyes get tired. She relaxes, returning to the green-purple-blue-pink hues she's used to, and Ianto falls to the wayside once more.
.oOo.
She knows about Jack's immortality, the fight of life and death that goes on inside him every moment of every day. It's hard to miss, especially for Gwen, who sees time and space and people as a single entity, connected strand to strand.
Time is Jack and Jack is time; and Jack is space and Jack is the people around him.
It might get tiring to a human to see everything through Gwen's eyes.
She's never known anything different.
Except Ianto.
She doesn't focus on Ianto much. Not enough. She sees his girlfriend, the ruined mass of flesh and metal that Lisa Hallett became—how often does that happen in Torchwood?—and has to cringe away as the sight hammers against her brain. Lisa is human, yes, but more—too sharp to be human, too bright, too loud, too—
Too much like Ianto for Gwen's comfort.
They kill Lisa.
She doesn't stay around to watch Ianto change color.
She should mention it to Jack. He told her about her immortality. Not that she didn't know beforehand. That's laughable. She is of the Earth, not ancient and not mysterious, but not human. She feels the pulsing of the city through the ground, hears the hum of the clouds above them, sees humanity as more than the shapes they seem.
She should mention it to Jack. Ianto hurts her eyes—he is grey, now, too, almost the same color as the black that crawled all over Suzie, yet silver takes over, covering his chest and his hands and his legs and his hands, pulsing-pulsing-pulsing, fighting against the warm pinks and purples that he should be.
Ianto is human, or he was once, same as Jack.
Sometimes it amazes Gwen that no one can see what she can.
She should mention it to Jack. She doesn't.
.oOo.
She approaches Ianto when the danger of Jack has passed. She can't feel his presence anywhere in the city, not that it matters. She doesn't work like that. She has fey blood; she's not magical.
"Let me come," she says to Ianto when he's heading out to get them food, and doesn't listen to his arguments.
He squints against the sun. He never wears sunglasses, never lowers his face. He should. Gwen can't look at him without straining herself, so she looks with her normal vision and sees his colors in their unnatural muted way, silver threatening to break through just how metal tears through the Earth. He stands fast against a perceived threat—is the sun a threat? Gwen loves soaking it in. Rhys makes fun of her for it. He doesn't need as much outside time, but he's not the one who's of the Earth, is he?
They don't argue about it. He makes sure most of their dates are either in the park or on restaurant terraces.
She's gotten more apprehensive about camping.
Gwen shakes her head to get rid of the memory and takes Ianto's elbow. It's sturdy, not as warm as she expects. Maybe it's the suits. Wool does that, doesn't it? Both retains heat and protects against it?
She'll have to ask Ianto.
But not now.
"Ianto?" she asks instead. "Are you human?"
Ianto fumbles with the cup of hot coffee in his hand—too fast, like a broken camera, snap-snap-snap, white-white-silver—and she catches it before he can. She has tricks up her sleeve, too.
She takes them out, just for a moment, to let Ianto compose himself.
"No," he says. "Yes."
It's the shock of the question. Gwen keeps them out of the world for a moment longer.
"I was," Ianto says. "I am."
Gwen waits.
He lifts a hand and flexes it into a fist. One moment open—silver-white-silver, flash-flash-flash—one moment closed. Gwen blinks to get the spots out of her vision.
"I was," Ianto repeats. "I don't know what I am anymore."
His fist is open, hand slack. His other can't shake, Gwen still holding on to the elbow. It's normal until she blinks and it isn't anymore. Ianto's swimming in front of her eyes. Pink is trying to break through, or is that just his shirt?
He's started wearing brighter colors. They don't do much against the onslaught of metal static that surrounds him.
He has large hands. Good to hold. Gentle. Silver veins moving up from his palm into his shirtsleeves, thin where she can see it, thick where she can feel it. The web continues on and on like vines. Not like vines. Vines follow a pattern; and they don't. They snake up, moving between cracks, growing-growing-growing, blooming in summer and making fences and walls in winter. They're fluid and smooth. Ianto's veins want to be.
But they're harsh. Lines, angles, fighting against the natural smoothness of his body, neither letting up.
They pulse with life. Not blood. Like a computer. Holding Ianto together, mending him at the expense of his humanity.
Gwen doesn't understand computers.
"What happened?" she doesn't want to ask.
"Torchwood."
Ianto's hand spasms. She feels it rather than sees it, the motion too quick to capture. For anyone else looking, Ianto's hand didn't move. She closes her eyes and squeezes the crook of Ianto's elbow. The world keeps moving.
.oOo.
"You're partially converted."
Ianto doesn't argue.
His blue darkens into almost the same color as his grey.
Gwen sits on an upturned box; there are many of them in the Archives. It's just them, Owen and Tosh having gone home for the night. She could feel Ianto here still, faintly, the way she can feel the Hub, not quite human and not quite alien; foreign, to her.
She wants to walk through the grass. Wants to be outside under the sun, breathing fresh air and not Torchwood's decay.
She doesn't ask if Jack knows. He doesn't know about her. Maybe he does. It doesn't matter. He's gone.
Ianto keeps filing.
Gwen rests her chin on her hand on her knee on her other leg. "Does it hurt?"
Ianto hums.
"Stupid question." Of course it hurts. Gwen hurts, and she just looks at him. "Do you need anything?"
Ianto snorts.
"We won't hurt you."
Silence.
"I won't hurt you."
She is Torchwood and Torchwood is her, but she's so much more than that. She is Earth and Earth isn't her, but it's close enough. Ianto spends every day a walking anomaly, human and wrong. Aren't all humans wrong?
Gwen sees in purples and pinks and blues and greens, and other colors, too, when she focuses and dulls her natural vision, but anyone of her kind appears in browns and yellows and reds as well, and colors no one, not even they, have words for.
"You should get out," she says, "of the Archives. Once in a while. See the sun. Touch the Earth."
"Don't like the countryside."
"Me, neither."
And it hurts. Her family's been in the city for years but they've always visited. Gwen doesn't want to look at her home and shrink away from it.
"Just the park," she promises.
Ianto hums.
He doesn't speak for the rest of the evening. Gwen wakes on the sofa in the main Hub; he must have carried her when she fell asleep.
Did he sleep? Does he need to?
.oOo.
"What's on your mind, love?"
Rhys is holding her hand. His other holds Gwen's shoes, a pair of insensible sandals. She's ahead of him, digging her toes into the soil, the grass, feeling the tickling of violets and dandelions on her ankles.
Rhys is green, mostly. It's why he's the brightest, the smallest color in her repertoire breaking through and illuminating the rest of him. He smiles when she doesn't answer; they're touching, she doesn't need to turn around to see.
"Ianto," she says when they sit without a blanket on the warm ground.
Rhys hums.
"He's... he's not like me, Rhys, I can't tell you what, but—I... He's not like me, but he needs me, Rhys."
Ianto needs fiercely, loves even more so, and stays silent all the while.
"I can't look at him," she confesses.
He's too much.
Jack knows, she decides. Even a man as blind as Jack can tell that Ianto isn't human when he takes off his shirt. She assumes. She's never seen Ianto even with short sleeves.
.oOo.
"He told me I look wrong."
Who? The Doctor?
Gwen's never seen him. She bumps her shoulder against Jack's; it's just the two of them at the hotel bar, him holding a water and her holding pineapple juice. She always got it as a kid when her parents took her into the human world, before they scorned her for fully entering it.
"You don't."
Jack chuckles darkly. "You don't know that."
"I do."
Jack's colors swirl and dance, intertwining in combinations she's never seen on a person, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. He's bright and impossible, but human. Different colors? So what? They move like they're supposed to, tied to time and space, longer than most people's but natural. Soft. Smooth. Rippling on an unseen wind, swaying in an invisible sea.
She closes an empty fist and opens it full of forget-me-nots.
"I do," she repeats.
Jack is silent.
"I do," Gwen repeats, and lets the flowers fall on the bar surface in front of them.
Jack hangs his head. Gwen lifts a flowerless hand to his shoulder and holds, steady-steady-steady, slow-slow-slow, time passing normally around them, anchoring Jack when he wants to fall through and disappear.
"He doesn't want to see me."
"Your Doctor?"
"Ianto." Jack chuckles darkly. "You know about him, too, then?"
Gwen doesn't say that he looks wrong, that it hurts to look at him. That's her problem.
"Doesn't he?" she asks instead.
Jack shrugs. "I didn't ask."
"You should."
"I did."
Gwen hums.
"On a date. He said yes. But he's…" He gestures vaguely above them where the rest of the building sleeps. "You know about him."
"Human, not-human. He's… he's Ianto." The world moves too fast around him, too fast and too slow at the same time, not giving him a place to exist within it, not letting him carve it out for himself.
Like Jack.
Like Gwen.
She doesn't resent it. She has Rhys. She has Jack. She has Ianto. She has Tosh and Owen and Andy and even her parents. She can see and feel and live, so much, even when she closes her eyes or falls asleep.
"He's like us," she tries not to say.
She fails.
At least Ianto is asleep.
.oOo.
Time, to Gwen, is not as fickle a thing as to some of her brethren. She can step out of it for moments at a time, but she's tied to the Earth, and the Earth spins stubbornly in one direction, moving on its designated path around the Sun. She feels the motion, calming, like the rocking of a cradle or the swaying of a willow tree.
In tune with time, she can place the last events of her life on a timeline. Not a straight line. A bit curvy. Not solid. Dotted where she took moments to herself—knotted, maybe, not dotted, paradoxical moments that passed and didn't, existing without time and tied directly to it at the same time.
She joined Torchwood. She led it. She stepped aside and watched the world be alright for a few months. She didn't see the intent in Aaron Copley's eyes when he pointed a gun at Owen, she didn't wake up on time to stop a warehouse from exploding, she was stretched too thin when Jack's brother killed two of her friends.
Gwen cannot turn back time.
She can't travel through it, either.
She vows to be more vigilant—she was vigilant once, wasn't she? She learned about Jack—maybe luck. She learned about Ianto—a simple observation.
She doesn't go home for days, fielding calls from Rhys and taking breathers in tiny bubbles of the timeline. She's never stopped time as often as she does now, just to get a bit of peace, just to—
Gwen's exhausted.
She wants to go home but finds herself unable to get up from under the dragon in the Hub. It's not even a comfortable sofa.
As she's debating, it dips down. She looks up sharply. "Ianto."
"You should go home."
"I'm trying."
"Are you?"
Gwen swats at his shoulder. "I'm tired."
He's tired, too. He doesn't say so. "You should go home."
He stands and offers her a hand, levers her up, puts her hand in the crook of his elbow with one hand and grabs her jacket with the other. He leads her out, through the cog door and into the lift, up through the tourist office and to the bay.
She thought it would be later. The sun shines down and the bay beats against the quay. Midday sun. Did she really spend so much time at the Hub?
"You can't teleport, can you?"
Gwen shakes her head. They haven't talked about it. Gwen knows that Ianto's partially converted, he knows that she's fey. It's a subject they skirt around, Ianto more than her; he doesn't talk and she doesn't know. He looks odd, painful, but she got used to it. Like looking at a sun—at its reflection.
"Shame." Ianto grins. "It would be pretty handy."
"It would be, wouldn't it?"
.oOo.
Spring shifts into summer into autumn. It's still warm. Gwen wears her jacket for fashion more than function. She jokes with passerby and teases Jack and Ianto about acting like a couple.
It lets her say what she can't verbalize: they're healing, the three of them, not moving on but not getting stuck in the mud.
She has no wings—Ianto asked when he was drunk, or maybe when he wasn't, making conversation and opening taboo subjects as if the future no longer mattered to him. She answered happily; it was only moments later that she realized how dark and apathetic Ianto looked.
They haven't broached the subject since.
She has no wings but she can fly on the morning breeze. It's crisp from the bay and warm from the sun. Let the aliens come! Gwen can take anything.
Even England.
The move from Wales turns her stomach—maybe it's morning sickness?
Her line is jumbled, all in order and all so close together she cannot pick the events apart: argument, bomb, baby, bomb, baby, bomb, baby, London.
She meets Ianto in the city. The children are talking and all she can do is squeeze his hand as darkness creeps over him, almost overtaking the silver static that has since become familiar. He hasn't been back to London since—
"I'm alright," he says, doing her the courtesy of whispering into her ear, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear.
She smiles up at him. She can see past the façade, literally and figuratively, but he squeezes her hand. Now's not the time.
Will it ever be?
.oOo.
As far as it goes, Gwen is pretty average. Not among humans, but she's not human in the first place. It doesn't count, the statistics are all wrong. Or something. Math was always Tosh's deal.
Gwen is average, unable to stop time for more than a few minutes, tired and pregnant and angry, stuck behind with Clem and soldiers that dared to barge into their safehouse, far away from Jack and Ianto, who stand tall and confident and brave against an enemy they can't even fight.
She was too slow for Owen. Too slow for Tosh. Too slow for Ianto, although she didn't even know him then.
Never again.
She strains her eyes at the monitor. The 456 are a muddy brown even through her normal eyes. A soldier barks at her; Gwen doesn't care. She doesn't freeze him in place, doesn't take herself out of time. She needs to be alert, needs to be able to help—and then she sees it.
A second before. Just a second.
A virus has been released.
She sees the warning flash of alarms and stands right before they turn on.
Not today. Not Ianto.
She stands and spreads her arms and closes her eyes and time stops.
Every parent, every child, every car, every soldier; every insect, every flying bullet, every breath of air, every speck of dust, every drop of water; everything, everyone, standing still, taken out of time, letting it pass by and ready to return the moment Gwen's concentration wavers.
It won't.
She turns on the spot and faces Thames House. Miles away, yet she knows where it is. The Doctor was right. Jack is not normal. Not normal, a beacon, gold and blue and grey, tendrils snaking through time, tying to places and people and events. Ianto, next to him, too dark and too bright; a beacon.
Gwen looks at Thames House and opens her eyes. She sees nothing. Darkness, for a second. Light. Color: gold and silver.
There they are.
Nothing moves. Not the air, not the virus, not her family stuck in the middle of it. One moment, and they do. Jack unsticks first, swaying and catching Ianto when he stumbles out of complete stillness into motion. They turn around, look at each other—come on, come on, come on, she can't keep this up for long—weirder things have happened in Torchwood—and rush to the doors.
Not following the laws of time and space, they open, pushing against an atmosphere that isn't there. Down the hall, one door, two, three, four, all the way downstairs.
Out, out, out, Gwen urges.
In, in, in they go.
She doesn't sigh, because movement would break her concentration, and she isn't surprised.
They run fast—Ianto was always the fastest when his body wasn't agonizingly fighting against his cyber implants—too fast, she can't hold on, she can't—
Gwen latches onto the virus, the potential particles that would mean the death of hundreds, and in her last breath, right as her arms fall weakly at her sides, throws it at the reviving 456.
Funny, that. She didn't think she'd be able to move things out of sync with the world.
She didn't think she'd be able to stop time for so long.
Gwen smiles, and falls.
.oOo.
There are arms around her—strong arms, steady arms, flesh and metal twisting together. There's a presence behind her, guarding her, holding her up—a chest, a familiar chest, a strong beating heart. On her side, holding her hand—a hand, a large hand, one without scars or blemishes.
Ianto, Rhys, Jack.
Gwen opens her eyes and sees smiles.