trace_of_scarlet

Fic: Chains Like The Sea
Fandom: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, mainly
Rating: PG
Words: 405
Warnings: No warnings. Very slight spoilers for Children of Earth and Miracle Day.
Beta:

plum177, who has given me much tea and love.
Summary: Pre-Miracle Day, Gwen suffocates beside the sea. Because suddenly Gwen is my very favourite character in Torchwood, and I LOVE HER. The title and the occasional reference come from Dylan Thomas's beautiful poem Fern Hill. Inspiration for this fic came from that poem and my friend

apiphile's amazing Gwen fic Lost Woman Song, which you should read. Immediately.

These days, Gwen doesn’t know where the end ends or the beginning begins; she simply... continues. Carries on, because it’s all she can do: it’s all she knows how to do, and thus she squabbles with Rhys, cares for her baby, and all the while the sea roars in her ears and the stars sing in her memories.

She had a life in the tunnels down by the water, and now she has a motherhood down by the sea. Rhys is happy here, she knows, back in the land of his father’s fathers and away from the madness she dragged into his once-comfortable life like a cat bringing home some strange prey. He was born to be a father, and it is when she looks at him and their baby that she remembers why she is here, why she carries on, and why she still smiles.

(Sometimes she wakes in the night believing she hears the stars outside her window or Jack’s voice on the radio, calling her back to herself. Usually she tells herself it is just a dream, but sometimes she rises from the bed clammy and half-paralysed with hope to look at nothing but the stars and wonders which one her captain has fled to.

It is selfish to feel abandoned, she knows, but still she wants to wail in the night like a little child, Unfair! Unfair! They started this together, and now she is alone in the dark.)

She has no more nightmares these days (she wonders if she should), only a semi-automatic under her bed and a sense of star-struck wonderment at what Gwen Cooper has become. All these things she knows, and yet there is so little she can do: bereft of her city, she suffocates beside the sea, and pretends she is happy. She is the only Torchwood member to make it out alive, and sometimes she is not so sure about even that.

But then her daughter giggles or Rhys makes a stupid joke, and she remembers why she is here. She is here because she is alive and Rhys is alive and because Anwen is breath-takingly, heart-breakingly alive, and while she has breath in her lungs and bullets in her gun they will stay that way, her little family living by the sea. And so she sings in her chains, her eyes on the stars, and pulls against the steel even as she carries on.