Notes: No real spoilers for S2 yet, but they'll probably come in any further installments. I'd direct you to my LJ for the most immediate updates, but my other posts on the topic would probably alienate pretty much everyone. But if you can deal with a bit of... shall we say... episode criticism, feel absolutely free to drop by, anything, anytime you like. It's not like I've had to put up a fence to keep people away...
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It happened too quickly, even for him; it seemed like the space of a heartbeat between when everything was normal and when everyone on his team had been pushed to their knees, guns to their heads.
Well. Not everyone on his team.
"So you call it 'retcon'," says Allison-- and why she thinks tying him up is going to do any good, he hasn't the slightest clue. All it'll do, long-term, is invite some truly delicious innuendo. He'd start on it now, but she's still talking, and he wants to know why.
"Probably thought you were being cute," she mutters, and goes behind his back for the knot. "You always think you're being cute. Everything you do, you do to be cute. But this time? I've got to hand it to you."
"Oh, really?"
"Mm-hmm. Total accident, of course, but you named the thing perfectly."
And now she's drawing him forward, eyes snapping, and he would've sworn her eyes weren't blue before. Maybe he hadn't looked enough. Well: obviously he hadn't looked enough.
"Check the internet," she said. "Retcons never work. Too many gaps-- there's always a thread or five left hanging. And when they fail-- well, hardly anything can alienate people more."
-
She's sitting on the couch, staring at her laptop (when isn't she, though?), and she's got music on there-- pop, sounds like maybe it's Japanese.
"Thought you weren't coming tonight," Owen says.
"You don't want me to be here?" she says. There's something just slightly off in her voice, but it's been a long day-- god knows it's been a long day.
"No-- course not. Just thought you weren't."
"Will you have enough time to ring Gwen, then?"
"Wha?"
Her laptop slams shut-- and suddenly she's in front of him, and the warmed steel of a concealed gun is up against his temple, and there's fury in her eyes like he would have sworn she could never be capable of. "I love you," she says. "You knew that. Why?"
"It was just once," he says. "Just the one thing-- it happened so fast, I swear I wasn't--"
"You always tell those lies! All of you, everyone-- you lie like no one else matters-- I'm done with it. I'm done with patience, I'm done with waiting with you-- probably I'm done with god-damned men-- I'm done making your excuses, I'm DONE, Owen! I'm not waiting for you anymore. And I'm not safe. I was never safe."
The safety clicks off. "Remember that in future."
She puts the safety on, holsters her gun, and picks up her laptop. "Tosh--"
She whirls around, gun back in her hand.
"...If I said I was sorry..."
"Are you? It'd be a shock. I'm tired of thinking you're enough. ALL of you. I'm tired of it, Owen!"
She puts the gun back and slams the door behind her, and he still doesn't understand.
-
She turns to leave, and this time, she'd really leave; this time, she's actually heading toward the door. And at this moment-- just at this moment-- you can't stand the thought of watching another person walk away.
"You forget what I know about you," you say.
"You don't know anything about me," she says, and you wonder if she actually believes that. "You don't know me," you couldn't have argued. "You barely know anything about me," that's a hard one to dispute. But to not know anything? Now that's ridiculous.
"I know enough," you say. "I know about you and Owen. I know about the RetCon pills that somehow seem to slip into you and your colleagues' pockets. I know what you've done. And I know his phone number."
"You son of a bitch," she says.
"Actually, no bitch was involved."
"He won't believe you."
"Yeah, he would. Trust me. The thing about taking someone's memories? You never-- really-- forget. There's always just one little line of synapses-- one last bundle of neurons, holding out, just waiting for the right chemical messenger to come along. You never remember. But if you're told-- if you try hard enough? You know."
Her hand hesitates above the handle; falls to her side. You've won.
For tonight. You still remember enough to know she'll never forgive you. You just don't particularly care.
-
The ghosts, she's readily come to accept, were just projections of that strange, strange demon-worshipping man. As should have been obvious, really-- why else would they want the thing opened? All those promises of mistakes undone, the safety of the world-- lies.
Then again. She can't help but think that her "mother" was suspiciously ambiguous in her pronouncements. She could have been telling her to stop them-- near the end, she was beginning to be pretty sure that had been what she meant. And then Owen fired, and she knew she'd waited too late.
But they weren't, actually, ghosts. She knows that.
And it's just the normal mechanics of dreaming that brought her mother into her dreams that night, random firing of neurons that made her show up by her bed. Association with old memories that made her lean down, place a familiar soft kiss on her forehead.
She knows all this. Still, she wonders what the explanation is for the words she dreamed she heard whispered in her ear.
"Toshiko, my beautiful daughter. Stay safe. And Toshiko, don't forget this-- have the strength to let love go."
-
All those moments are playing back in her head, now, all the pieces fitting together perfectly now that it's too late.
Too good for us now, aren't you? from practically the first day she'd joined Torchwood.
Oh, showing a little mercy to the beat cops, now, are we?
You and your special agency... think you can waltz in whenever you want...
You're not better than us. Stop rubbing it in our face.
"You're insane," she realizes, finally.
"More self-righteousness!" sneers the man who used to be her friend. "Think you're all better than me--"
"No! I don't! I never did! You keep sayin' that and I don't know why!"
"Because you do. You think you're better than me. And you're not, Gwen. You're just a stupid whore like the rest of them. I saw you with that man, Gwen. That doctor? What does that fat sod Rhys think about that?"
"I--" The breath's stopping in her throat, and damn it, this is not the time. "You've been stalking me?"
Andy laughs. "Gwen, Gwen, Gwen." The knife-blade catches the light. "I think we have more important things to talk about."
They can track her: Toshiko can track her. They can track her, and they will, and any moment, Jack and the others will come in, guns drawn. Any moment now.
From the look on his face, she prays to god it's soon.
-
We drifted, for a while. We couldn't help it. It was the uncertainty of it. Where had he gone? Had he run away, was he coming back? Had we hallucinated him coming back at all? It would make more sense, if we'd hallucinated his return, but wouldn't most of our day-to-day lives? And wasn't that a terrifying thought?
Had something taken him? Was he waiting for us to find him? We looked and looked, and looked, but we couldn't find a trace. We found the surveillance footage: that arm of his, it'd started to glow, and he'd taken it and left. That thing he'd never explained. One of many things he never explained.
No anchor of him left, not even a trace of it, so we drifted, for a while; and then we remembered that it wasn't about him, it had never been about him. It was about the city, about the world-- the responsibility we had to it, to protect it.
And so we worked. Those first few days, you could see us working around him, see us still in orbits around the space that he'd left. But we adjusted, worked around him, decided who was in charge in what and got to yell at whom, and after a little while, it was working. Sort of. It was working.
And then he came back, like we were supposed to understand why. He wouldn't explain; so often he won't explain. But we need him. He knows what he's doing, we can feel it. He understands these things, he can face them every day without a blink. This is a world he can live in.
And we don't, we can't. We live in this world, but it's not our own; and there's a few weak moments we think it's killing us, slowly, a toxin building up in our minds. A quantum shift that'll get us someday, collapse all our atoms into dust.
But as long as the Rift's there, so are we; we'll work to contain it until it kills us, and then we'll rest. Unlike him.
We'll work 'till we come to the end, and that'll be okay, because we know he'll be there beyond it.
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