"The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
- Robert Frost

Even on the clearest of Cardiff days, when the wind from the bay hardly chills her bones on the walk towards the Plas and her coffee from the local cafe tastes a bit better than usual, she still knows all that doesn't mean just because she's at work her brain got there, too.

Working for Torchwood has it moments of frustration. Some days, that frustration caps at her inability to locate the "Select All" button on her e-mail before she hits "Delete."

( Gwen's Inbox )

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Quote from Robert Frost
Verse: Open/Crack
Word Count: 82 + image
Note: Liberties with canon timeline have been taken.

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
- Arthur Schopenhauer


The gunfire broke the air around them. The spring wind of Cardiff burned Gwen’s nose, tinted with gunpowder, smoke, and the tangy scent of blood. Familiar smells.

She ducked down behind the burned out shell of a car. Jack crouched next to her, shouting orders across the yard at Ianto, most of his orders unnecessary and lost in the gunfire. The team worked like a single entity during these times, moving around each other like water flowing across rocks, parting long enough to do their duties before seamlessly running back together. They were three parts of the same mind, and words, at times, were unneeded.

Gwen popped up from behind the car and fired off her gun before crouching back down. She looked at Jack, and then her eyes roved around looking for the girl. The one that had helped him. She was an alien, of course, but a good one, a lost one, who had warned them against the small invasion that drew near.

The condemned warehouse that had been the meeting place for the small, dangerous band of aliens towered over them, and Gwen’s eyes moved to the door. Six dead bodies littered across the yard. If it hadn’t been for their green blood glinting in the gentle Cardiff sun, Gwen would have thought they were human.

Gwen glimpsed the girl as she slipped into the door of the warehouse. She appeared young, only about sixteen, although she claimed she was much older. She had been posing among humans for years, until she found Torchwood.

Really, she had found Gwen. Outside the Hub, two days before. Jack hadn’t believed the girl at first, but she was gentle and persuasive. Gwen sat with her for hours in the interrogation room, and they drank strong, black coffee that Ianto served them with a dark, foreboding look on his silent face.

( They all knew how things would end, she supposed, because things always ended the same way. )

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Quote from Arthur Schopenhauer
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 1016

Trust is one of those words that people use, to often, to generally. Like love and loyalty and honesty. Used so often it loses meaning, after a while, because it just rests on your tongue like something you would say to anyone, any day, without thinking about what it really means, without understand the power you have behind being able to say it.

You can’t know what it’s like to trust until you have something to actually entrust with someone. I have a secret like that. One I can’t share with anybody, because it doesn’t matter anymore who I trust.

I trust Jack… with my life. With my heart. With a million other things he probably doesn’t deserve. I trust Ianto, with my well being, to keep me strong. I know I can trust Martha, to be here when Jack rings. He can trust her, so I can too.

I trust the Doctor. Or Sarah Jane Smith. But they aren’t my friends, rather just names I’ve read and faces I know will be there when they are called upon to fight beside us.

I can trust Rhys. Finally. He deserves every little bit I can give him, because he’s part of it now.

Then there is everyone else. Mum, dad, my friends. The girls I knew at college, girls I’ve known most of my life. Andy. Old lovers, new lovers, the lovers in between. I can’t say I trust them. Because if I did, I would tell them, without the threat of worry or retcon or what Jack will say. I have one secret. One pressing, dark, festering bloody secret I can’t tell a single one of them. Who I trust doesn’t matter anymore. It’s about who Torchwood trusts. And I am Torchwood, and Torchwood is me.

I still trust. And I still have friends. But they can’t always be one in same.

It has such power, a word like trust. A power that is no longer mine to control.

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Do you trust your friends?
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 329

It started as a hiccup in the system, a miss-spelled name.

Gwen Coooper.

“Bloody hell, Ianto,” I barked, hitting the keyboard after my third failed log-on attempt. I was trying to not be angry, to not want to slam the taunting computer screen with my fist, but to no possible avail. I was worried I would start crying. “It’s not letting me do a thing. I can’t log into the damn system.”

Ianto came up behind me, his presence working like a soothing cream across the flashes of anger that surged. I wasn’t sure what to do without him, and Jack. The Hub, once filled with laughter and smite and, yes, sometimes even sex, had faded into an echo of silence. Sometimes, alone at night, I thought I could hear the echo of the weevils crying in the dark. It was like every ghost story come to life.

“What do you mean?” he asked, peering over my shoulder.

“My account has been corrupted,” I replied. “Or… something. I don’t know, it was working fine yesterday.”

He pointed at the screen. “Your name is miss-spelled.”

“I know that. It keeps telling me I need a system administrator password to make changes.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, we can just ask T-” his words seemed to choke in his throat, and my hands stilled carefully over the keyboard.

( It wasn’t like him, to forget. It wasn’t like any of us. )

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Misspelled Names
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 1195

"Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies." - Ann Landers

Gwen Cooper knew too well what dying felt like. After all, she had died before.

At least, she was pretty sure Suzie had killed her, at least for a moment. But there had only been darkness there, and even now, she refused to believe in the blackness of death.

That was Suzie’s darkness, not her own.

She turned her head and her cheek slapped against cold pavement. She watched thick blood pool from her side, mottled in the dust speckled light streaming through the warehouse. She wanted to scream for Jack and Ianto, but her mouth was too dry, her lips cracked and the tearing pain in every inch of her body was too much to fight through to form words. She tried to detach herself, and concentrated on the way her vision swam, the way her stomach tightened with nausea, the way the musty smell of blood filled her nostrils.

They wouldn’t find her in time; that she was sure of. But to concentrate on anything other than the pain was enough. She realised this must have been how Tosh felt, when the life was drained from her own body. At least she had the warmth of dying in Jack’s arms.

The warehouse stone was cold against her back.

She closed her eyes against the darkness.

***

( Owen’s hands were on her. )

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: 136. "Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies." - Ann Landers
Verse: Open
Word Count: 1150

Gwen carefully wrapped the presents and too care that they were sent out in time for Christmas. Some were easy to deliver (just plopping them on the desk Christmas Eve before heading back to the flat) and some a little harder (even though intergalactic parcel delivery was becoming much easier, considering her contacts.). Each were wrapped the same, with the same bow, and a tiny card with a personalized note.

( To Jack )

( To Ianto )

( To Owen )

( To Katie )

( To the Other Doctor )

( To Jenny )

( To The Doctor )

( To The Master )

( To Captain John Hart )

( To the UNIT People )

The last one she gave next to the lit Christmas tree, in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied with a kiss.

( To Rhys )

Arrogance - The best leaders inspire by example. When that's not an option, brute intimidation works pretty well, too.". -Larry Kersten

“No, Rhys, no,” Gwen shook her head, swatting at him, but she couldn’t help but smile.

“Oh, come on, Gwen, it’s bloody brilliant!” Rhys grinned so big Gwen was afraid his face would tear open. “You have to admit, it’s perfect for that Jack of yours.”

“He’s not my Jack,” Gwen muttered, but her smile didn’t falter. “And it’s not funny.”

“It’s hysterical.” He forced the picture into her hands. “Come on, you have to take it in with you. Go on, then!”

Gwen held the picture and gave it a sideways glance. It wasn’t particularly clever, not even overly funny, but she couldn’t help the small swell of satisfaction that Rhys had donated something to her plight. As cheeky as it was, it was a step in Rhys accepting her line of work, and every step brought them closer to understanding each other.

She slipped into the Hub and wandered past Jack and Ianto, hunched over one of the desks. They gave her both a sideways glance and a distracted greeting. She didn’t mind; Jack would figure it out soon enough when he wandered down into the vaults.

After she chose a place on the wall in front of a weevil cage, she hung the picture up and smiled smugly to herself. It seemed appropriate, for the company the photo would keep, and even more appropriate for the situation she found herself in every day. After all, the standard motivational poster one would find in any office didn’t have a place in the confines of Torchwood. They spent their days breaking the rules, and there was no presence to regulate how they did it. Except Jack. And as Rhys said, this was for him.

Gwen grinned to herself and bounced out of the vaults, not giving Janet a second glance. If nothing else, she thought pleasantly, at least Owen would have approved of the new addition hanging in the bowels of the Hub.

( To Jack, with love, Gwen )


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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Arrogance
Verse: Crack/Open
Word Count: 324

She remembered being that cold and scared once. She had been sixteen, and her schoolmates talked her into jumping into the bay the day they graduated. Through her uniform the cold of the water seeped as if into her bones and her body seared with an aching fire and no matter how hard she laboured she was certain she would never breathe again.

Gwen felt that way now, over ten years later, shivering against the blow of the wind, the echo of pelting rain against the brim of her hat, her uniform soaked through. And when he looked up, his bright eyes cutting through the fog and the rain, her body seared again with that strange and frigid pain, and she couldn’t breath.

She had heard them talking, the strange group beneath her. Seen what they had done; watched them raise the bleeding, stone cold dead man back to life. And when the man in the coat looked up at her, standing next to the now dead-again man, he caught his gaze with her own and shouted, through the rain.

“What do you think?”

And she couldn’t. Couldn’t think through the fog in her mind, couldn’t breath through the air that hovered frozen around her mouth.

So she did the only thing she could do.

She ran.

***

( Rhys’ voice pounded against her ears. )

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Muse: Gwen Cooper, Torchwood
Prompt: Five Times You Ran and One Time You Didn’t
Verse: Open/Canon
Word Count: 1350

Gwen slips into work earlier today, hoping it's earlier enough to beat Ianto, at least, and leaves the following on his desk.




She leaves a note next to it:

Ianto,
Happy birthday! Today, I make the coffee. I was going to get you a new French press, but yours is in brilliant condition, and I saw this in a shop window and got it instead. I know you have a real one already, but she's not quite as cuddly as this one.
All my love, Gwen

( She places the gift on his desk chair. )