Title: Tears of the Weevil

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Don't own Torchwood, the characters or anything related to the show.

"So this is Torchwood then?" Emmerich exclaimed as she took in the sight of the hub. "Impressive." Gwen followed her gaze around the hub, remembering the first time she'd seen the inside of Torchwood. It didn't seem so impressive without Toshiko tapping away at her computer and Ianto milling around in the background, keeping everything running. Now it just seemed like a vast empty shell, imprisoning them all.

"You look like crap." She smiled as Owen approached her. He looked exhausted. His face was etched by time and he looked far older than he was. "Something's wrong." She could tell he was worried.

"It's nothing." He choked out, ignoring Lacey's glare. "I love you Gwen…I wish I'd told you that years ago." Suddenly Gwen realised just how run down Owen was. In three short years he had become an old man, his hair was greying from stress and the lines of time had written his story all over his face. She'd missed the years that mattered most, falling in love with Owen, agreeing to marry him and having his child. She felt a longing in the pit of her stomach.
"You want to go back." It wasn't a question and he wasn't judging her either. He walked calmly to his desk and unlocked his top drawer. She followed him curiously and found him holding a bright green metal cylinder. "The first device had enough for two trips, but I used it before Jack did. I went back to the past and I took the second device from storage, so Ianto couldn't find it…I didn't want to lose you a second time."

"Why now?" He had seen her upset before, in tears and close to breaking point, what was different this time?

"Why not?" Jack interrupted, saving Owen the pain of an explanation. "This sooner you go back home and stop the infection ever happening the better. What's keeping you here?" Gwen looked from the captain to the blonde sitting quietly beside him. Her daughter wouldn't be there when she got back. It would be like another member had died. "Why don't you go with them? Say goodbye properly kiddo?" Jack wrapped an arm around the blonde's shoulders and whispered something to her. She nodded without looking up and stood between her parents and placed a hand on the sphere. Owen placed his and Gwen's hands on the sphere and the room exploded in a shower of light as time began to be torn away from them.

The experience was all together unpleasant. Gwen felt like she was being pulled in a thousand directions while someone crushed her skull. She couldn't see or feel the others but she could sense they were there. Almost as soon as the sensation started it ceased. A new sensation of pain filled her body as they slammed to the ground. Owen grunted as he fell to the ground on all fours. The pain and the process of returning had forced him to retreat to his instinctive state and so when Toshiko looked up from her workbench she found a strange blonde woman and a weevil surrounding Gwen, who had mysteriously appeared out of nowhere.

"Jack!" Her weapon was out of its holster before the words had left her mouth. Gwen broke out in a large grin. She was home. Finally after months in the future, away from the life she knew, she was finally home. Her happiness was short lived however as she heard Owen's whimpering. As he gasped in pain a tuneless yet mournful whistle like sound errupted around them. The weevils in the cells below, and what seemed like all the weevils in Cardiff, began to cry for their father. They could sense his pain as his life force began to dwindle. "Owen? Oh my god, what's wrong?"

Dropping to her knees she tried to see what was wrong. The pain in Owen's abdomen was unbearable and his vision had become blurred from losing so much blood. The shirt on his back, made all the more tighter in his weevil form, clung to him from a mixture of sweat and blood. Finally the last of his strength gave way and he collapsed to the floor, panting for breath. Gwen moved as carefully as she could and peeled the jacket from him revealing the blood soaked shirt below. "Just hang on, you're going to be ok. We'll fix you up and send you back good as new…" She trailed off as he released the sphere from his hand and it rolled out in to the room. It's eerie green glow had been lost and it simply sat like its counter part had in the future, devoid of colour of power.

"I'm sorry." His words were strained as each one felt like it was twisting the bullet inside him. "If I wasn't a weevil I'd be dead by now."

"No." Tears ran down her face as the weevil requiem grew louder. "You can't be dying, what about Lacey? She's stuck here, you can't just leave her."

"I knew what I was doing coming here." Lacey finally spoke. "Jack knew this was a one way trip." Gwen shook her head as though if she denied it enough it wouldn't really be happening.

"She's got a pretty damn good mum to keep an eye on her." He smiled as Lacey took hold of one of his hands and Gwen held the other. His tired, weevil eyes looked up as Owen and Jack approached, followed closely by Ianto. "He doesn't…know…how lucky…he is." Owen sighed as his younger self stood rooted to the spot, staring wildly at Gwen as she sat comforting a dying weevil. "To have…my girls." It was the last thing he said before heaving out one last growl. He used every last ounce of life within him to pull the death rattle out. Lacey involuntarily followed suit along with the rest of the weevils in the hub. The others covered their ears as the deafening roar echoed throughout the entire Hub.

As the silence settled over them, for neither human nor weevil made any sound, it seemed to pollute the atmosphere, coating the air with grief.

"What the hell is going on?" As usual Owen was the first to speak. His snarling snapped Gwen away from the body in front of her to the young man standing over her. He looked younger than she ever remembered him. Inexperienced and untouched. Her body acted of its own accord as her arms wrapped around his waist and she pulled him tightly against her. She needed to be strong, for herself and for her daughter, but with Owen standing before her, and the world safe, for now at least, she just wanted to fall apart.

Lacey sat beside her father's body and stared down at the empty shell that had once been her role model. He had saved her from her self imposed isolation and hatred of weevils, shown her how to accept what she was, and to hide it from others. As she looked up at Jack only he seemed to know what was going on, as the all knowing Captain Jack Harkness always did. She knew her true identity would have to be hidden from the others. They wouldn't understand a weevil hybrid, and Owen sure as hell wasn't ready to know he had a daughter who was almost twenty two years old. She looked away from Jack's piercing stare and back down at her father's body. The other weevils in the hub, in the sewers of Cardiff and everywhere else acknowledged their father was gone, but a new authority had arisen. As the first tears of her adult life began to fall she used all her willpower to silence the weevil inside her that screamed for release.

A/N: The reference to weevils crying/mourning as a 'tuneless' 'mournful whistle' and knowing when one them has died comes from the book Slow Decay by Andy Lane. I loved his portrayal of weevils and found this description of how they mourn quite fitting. Just got the epilogue to go now!