Archive of Our Own

Gwen doesn’t remember much, after the hospital. Can’t remember much. It’s all fragments, images, snatches of conversation, weaker and weaker as her life slips away into Suzie’s, as the wounds below her chin and at the back of her head gape wider and bloodier, as she slowly dies.

She remembers the road at night, every streetlight an indistinct blur to eyes that refuse to focus, Suzie’s voice as she talks to . . . Jack? It must be, because Jack’s coming to save her, Jack and Torchwood.

‘But would you, when there’s a part of her that’s now me?’ asks Suzie, in half a smirk, half a sob. ‘Could you really do that if I’m the only thing left of her?’

I’m still here, thinks Gwen, but she can’t move the words past her lips.

She loses the thread of the conversation then, drifting in and out of unconsciousness. Suzie keeps driving, the road keeps going. The night turns to day, slowly at first, fingers of dawn on the horizon, then all at once, and the car’s parked, and Suzie’s helping Gwen out, her arm around her shoulders.

‘It’s beautiful, Gwen,’ says Suzie, as they stumble together down the pier. Gwen’s legs don’t want to work, and she doesn’t want to go anywhere with Suzie, but she fights as hard as she can to walk because she has a feeling that if she falls, she’ll never get back up again. ‘Can you see it?’

All Gwen can see is the sun, too bright but better than the dark.

Suzie’s still talking, her voice eager, something about how they’ll run away together, how no one will hurt them. Gwen wishes she could believe her, but she’s slowly being shot in the head and Suzie’s already hurt her so much.

She doesn’t know what happens next, how Suzie manages to carry her down the pier. It’s like she blinks, and she’s somewhere else, lying down on something hard and flat, Suzie’s concerned face hovering above her, haloed by fluorescent lights.

Gwen swallows, painfully. ‘Where . . .’

‘Shh, don’t try to speak,’ says Suzie. ‘We’re on the ferry now. You’re doing so well.’

She strokes Gwen’s cheek, her hand cool and smooth. A small comfort.

‘Not long now,’ says Suzie, and sighs. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I could give you more time. Poor Gwen Cooper. Safe journey.’

Suzie leans down, and kisses Gwen. It’s gentle, and soft, and brief, and the last thing Gwen feels before it all falls away. Suzie and the ferry and her own body; it’s all gone, nothing left but the darkness.

There’s nothing, nothing at all, nothing but the dark, nothing but what must be death, and something, maybe, just on the edge of perception—

And then a snap, and light, and colour and sound and sensation.

Gwen bolts upright, her heart thudding in her ears, reaching out for anything, anyone. Her head’s still killing her but she’s alive, she’s here, she can think and feel and live.

Her grasping hands find Suzie’s, and she gasps out, ‘What happened?’

Suzie’s eyes are wide, her grip on Gwen’s hands almost too tight but she wouldn’t give up that touch, any touch, for the world.

‘They destroyed the glove,’ says Suzie. She shakes her head, then grins wildly. ‘Did you feel it? They tried to kill us, but we’re still here. You’re still here. I never thought—I never thought it could be that good.’

‘You wanted to kill me,’ says Gwen. They’re still holding hands, and now that she’s not actively dying she can see the other passengers on the ferry all giving them sidelong looks, but none of that’s important right now. ‘That was your plan all along. Were you going to just dump me into the channel as soon as you got what you wanted?’

Suzie’s smile drops away then, and she looks almost desperately sad. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you,’ she says, and Gwen scoffs. ‘I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone—’

‘You’ve killed four people,’ says Gwen, though she does have the sense to keep her voice down. ‘Seven if you count what you did to Max. Eight if you count—’

Me, she’s about to say. Because she died, didn’t she? She was dead, and now she’s not. Just like Suzie.

‘I know,’ says Suzie. ‘I know what I’ve done, but it was the only way. Don’t you see? Would you go back there, back into the dark, if there was even a chance you could stop it?’

Gwen looks into Suzie’s eyes, dark and miserable. She wants to say anything else, she really does, but . . .

‘No,’ admits Gwen, and Suzie gives her a tremulous smile. ‘But we can’t just leave. We have to go back to Torchwood, explain what happened.”

At that, Suzie finally lets go of her hands. ‘What do you think will happen if we do?’ she says. ‘Jack will welcome us back with open arms? No, he’ll lock me up, or kill me, or worse, and he’ll do the same to you, because you’re like me now. Alien. Wrong.’

Gwen remembers what Jack said to her, that he’d kill Suzie rather than let her live forever. She hadn’t believed him at the time, not really, or at least she hadn’t wanted to believe him.

Was Suzie right, back in the car? Gwen doesn’t know Jack at all. Can she say she knows he won’t hurt her if she goes back, that he’ll help her?

(Tosh and Owen and Ianto wouldn’t let Jack do anything to her, would they? But Gwen’s frightened to realise she doesn’t know that either.)

And if Gwen goes back, where does that leave Suzie? She’s a murderer, but she should be arrested, put on trial, something. Not just killed and covered up by Torchwood.

‘I can’t leave everything behind,’ says Gwen, like she can find some argument that will convince Suzie they can stay, that will make everything turn out okay. ‘I have a life, a boyfriend—oh God, what are they going to tell Rhys? He’ll think I’ve died.’

‘Probably,’ says Suzie, like it won’t completely devastate him. And her mum and dad, and all her friends, they’ll all think she’s dead, and it won’t make a difference that she isn’t, because she’ll never see them again. ‘Torchwood will tell everyone some touching story about how you died in the line of duty, then pay for the funeral so no one will ask any questions.’

‘Have you done that for someone before?’

‘No, not me,’ says Suzie, ‘but it’s right there in the rules and regulations. We give our lives to Torchwood, then we end up giving them our deaths too.’

‘Isn’t that exactly what you want me to do for you?’ says Gwen, and now she sounds just as bitter as Suzie does, if less resigned. ‘You took my life from me, or tried to, anyways, and now you want what’s left of it.’

Gwen stands up abruptly, before Suzie can say anything. She sways alarmingly for a second, the pain in her head suddenly a stabbing instead of a dull throb, but she grits her teeth and gets through it.

‘I need some air,’ she says. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that. It’s a ferry, where am I going to go?’

She hurries away as quickly as she can, not able to bear looking at Suzie for a minute longer.

Everyone’s still staring at her and pretending not to, but Gwen ignores them and goes to the railing, closing her eyes and feeling the cold wind on her cheeks and breathing in the salt air.

‘Fuck,’ she mutters. What is she going to do?

She can’t go back to Torchwood, that’s for certain. But neither is she about to go swanning off with a murderer to God knows where, and never see her family again. There has to be some other option, some middle ground between those two, doesn’t there? Some way she can fix things?

Gwen opens her eyes and stares out at the channel as it rushes past. It’s still early in the morning, the sky blue and crisp overhead. On a normal day, she’d probably be driving to work now, wondering what the Rift was going to spit out this time. It’s only been three months, but Torchwood was the best job she’d ever had.

Was, she thinks. Already past tense. Dead and gone, just like her. Just like Suzie.

She doesn’t particularly want to, but she glances back at Suzie.

Somehow Gwen had expected to see Suzie looking at her, but though she’s still sat on the hard plastic seats, she’s staring off into the middle distance instead, her head bowed slightly. Her face is obscured by her hair, but Gwen gets the feeling that if she could see her expression, it’d be . . . sad. Lost. She doesn’t think she deserves anything good, not even life, but she can’t let go, can’t stop any of it no matter how bad it gets, no matter what she does—

Gwen blinks, and the feeling’s gone.

What was that? It was almost as if she were Suzie, as if she was in her head, just for a moment. But that’s impossible. She must have imagined it. Or having a psychotic break, with her luck.

Gwen turns resolutely back to the water before Suzie can catch her staring.

So she can’t go back, and she can’t stay here. And she has another problem to consider; even if she does figure out another option, she doubts Suzie will just let her go without a fight.

Maybe she should just jump in the channel, Gwen thinks, though surely the only thing that will achieve is making her even more miserable than she is now.

Alright, Gwen tells herself, think. There has to be a way out of this.

So the glove (she can hear Ianto saying “Risen Mitten” and does her best to ignore it) let her bring Suzie back, by creating a connection between them that slowly gave Gwen’s life to her. When the glove was destroyed, instead of breaking the connection, it . . . stabilised it, somehow.

Tentatively, Gwen touches the wound at the back of her head, then the one under her chin. They’re both sore, tender, her skull disturbingly soft under her hand, but there’s no blood, no broken skin. Shot in the head, but only halfway. Alive and dead at the same time, caught in between.

But if that’s the case, surely there’d be a way to tip the balance, as it were. Not to death, but back to life, full life. The glove is gone, but the knife might still be at Torchwood. What was it Tosh had said? Metallic resonance. Another piece of the puzzle.

And, after all, gloves come in pairs. If there’s another one, the odds are slim it’ll ever end up coming through the Rift, but it’s not impossible. All Gwen has to do is bide her time, wait for an opportunity, and it just might work.

It also means she’ll have to stick with Suzie for the time being, yet somehow the idea doesn’t seem quite as awful as it did. At least she’ll have someone who understands, understands death, Torchwood, all of it. At least she won’t be alone.

The ferry stops in Bristol.

Suzie keeps eyeing Gwen suspiciously, like she thinks she’ll just run off if given the chance, but Gwen keeps following her, just as steadily.

‘We have to keep moving,’ says Suzie, frowning intently at a bus timetable she’s found somewhere. ‘They’ve managed to override the lockdown, and I removed the tracker on your car at the hospital but it won’t be long before they track it down to Hedley Point.’

She’s speaking off-hand, more to herself than anything, but Gwen frowns and says, ‘Lockdown? What lockdown?’

‘Oh,’ says Suzie, like she’s forgotten Gwen’s there. ‘Before I shot myself, I set up a secret protocol to shut down the Hub, just to buy us a bit of time on our way out.’

She says it as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Gwen supposes that for her, perhaps it is.

‘Of course you did,’ says Gwen. Then, without thinking: ‘Tosh said you were good at computers.’

‘Did she?’ says Suzie, with a small, thoughtful smile. She looks almost wistful, then sighs and turns her attention back to the timetable. ‘We need to get to the Bristol aeroport as quickly as possible.’

There’s not much cash in Gwen’s wallet, only enough for bus tickets and a few extra quid. She has her credit card too, but they won’t be able to use that without Torchwood tracking it.

Sat at the back of the bus, headed for the aeroport, Gwen says, ‘And how are you planning to buy plane tickets with four pound, exactly?’

‘I have some money in a long-term storage locker at the aeroport,’ says Suzie. ‘Several aeroports, actually, and train stations, just in case. Passports too, though we’ll have to have one made for you. I never planned to do this with someone else.’

Gwen purses her lips. No, she planned to do it with Gwen’s dead body lying behind her, another sacrifice so Suzie Costello can live forever.

They pass the rest of the bus ride in silence. Gwen doesn’t trust herself to play nice, and she has to if her plan is going to work, while Suzie seems just as content to stare out the window at the passing motorway.

(She’s arranged her hair in some sort of way to hide the exit wound at the back of her skull, but whenever Gwen glances over at her, she imagines she can still see the gaping, bloody edges.)

Suzie’s paranoia must be rubbing off on her.

They’re at the aeroport now, and Gwen keeps jumping every time someone comes near her, certain she’s about to look up and see Torchwood ready to drag her and Suzie back to Cardiff.

It never is, of course, but she can’t shake the feeling, and as she follows in Suzie’s wake through the aeroport, she tries to assure herself they still have time. If Torchwood finds her car at Hedley Point, well, multiple ferries use the pier there, all with multiple disembarkation points. They’ve only paid cash, and every new stop opens up new possibilities for where they could have gone. Even Tosh would need some time to sort through it all, and in the meantime, they’ll be getting farther and farther away.

The thought shouldn’t feel quite so bleak as it does.

‘Alright,’ says Suzie, breaking Gwen’s train of thought.

They’ve stopped at a bank of lockers, and Suzie takes a few pins from her hair before bending over one of the locks. Gwen supposes even she couldn’t figure out a way to make sure she had the key on her when she was resurrected.

Inside the locker are the usual accoutrement for going on the run: a passport, other IDs, stacks of cash, a handful of mobile phones. There’s a purse stashed at the back as well, and Suzie shifts everything inside before shutting the door again.

‘I’ll ring the bloke who did my IDs,’ says Suzie as she starts digging in her purse, presumably for one of the mobiles. She has a look on her face that seems to be questioning why she can orchestrate an elaborate scheme to bring herself back from the dead but can’t ever find something in her purse. ‘Would you buy the tickets while I do? It’ll cost a fortune going so last-minute, but we can’t wait around any longer.’

‘Where are we going?’ asks Gwen.

‘Anywhere you want,’ says Suzie, and gives her a brief, tentative smile before returning her attention to her bag. ‘Well, anywhere a reasonably short distance away with flights leaving tonight. Somewhere with a large English-speaking portion of the population would also be preferable. Oh, finally.’

She pulls out a mobile, then a shockingly large stack of money she gives to Gwen.

‘That should be enough,’ she says, and then, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Still, Suzie hesitates, looking at Gwen with some indefinable expression on her face. Is it that she thinks Gwen will run as soon as her back is turned?

Or is it what Gwen suddenly realises, that ever since she broke Suzie out of the Hub last night, they haven’t been more than a few feet apart from each other? There’s a connection between them now, a tether, and there’s still so little they understand about the glove, how it works. If they go too far, will the connection snap? Will Gwen be free?

And if so, why does the idea make her feel quite so sad?

But in the end, they both turn away, and walk off, and nothing happens. They’re stuck together, for better or for worse (probably worse), until if and when Gwen finds a solution.

She tries her best to stop thinking about that, and stares up at the departures board.

Other than a weekend in Paris with Rhys, and a few trips into England, Gwen hasn’t ever been out of the country. She’s not sure where to go, where to choose; but then again, she doubts they’ll be staying long. If they want to escape Torchwood, they’ll have to keep running.

‘Well?’ says Suzie when Gwen comes back, only a few hundred-pound notes left.

‘Sweden,’ says Gwen. ‘Though I’m sure the ticket agent will remember me, paying with cash.’

Suzie frowns but says, ‘It’s a risk we’ll have to take.’

The ‘bloke who did Suzie’s IDs’ meets them in the aeroport carpark. He’s a shifty-looking fella, always keeping his head down and away from any CCTV. Gwen must have seen dozens like him in her police days, skittish low-level criminals never too far away from their next arrest, but clearly Suzie trusts him to do the job.

Or perhaps he’s too terrified of her to do otherwise, considering how he calls her miss and ends every sentence like it’s a question. Either way, he takes a few photographs of Gwen, promises he’ll have a passport and a driver’s licence ready before their flight leaves, then all but flees back to his car.

‘What did you do to him?’ asks Gwen drily.

‘I may have implied I worked with a government agency that could choose to prosecute him at any moment, but would likely prefer to just have him disappeared,’ says Suzie. ‘Which wasn’t far from the truth, except for that we wouldn’t have much interest in a human documents forger from Bristol.’

Gwen notices her use of ‘we’ rather than ‘they,’ but doesn’t comment. She understands perfectly just how hard it is to separate yourself from Torchwood. Once it’s got its claws in you . . . well, apparently there’s no getting them out, not even after death.

They spend the rest of the day in a sort of haze of waiting and overpriced aeroport food. It almost doesn’t feel real, like at any moment Gwen will blink and she’ll be back in the Hub like nothing ever happened.

Then, of course, she looks over at Suzie, or feels another of those odd flashes of emotions that aren’t quite hers, and reality crashes back in. And that’s something else she needs to figure out, once she gets a chance to stop and rest and think.

Still, there’s no going back now. Even before Suzie’s bloke comes back with the IDs, even before they board the plane, even before it takes off for Sweden . . . there’s nothing Gwen can do but to keep going, down along the path of least resistance. It’s not something she’s ever done before, stubborn to the last, but she’s been lost ever since the moment she put on the glove and brought Suzie back, and she can’t even bring herself to regret it.

Gwen Cooper and her bleeding bloody heart, she thinks, and sighs.

When Gwen picked Sweden as their next destination, she wasn’t exactly thinking of sightseeing and a holiday. She did, however, expect a chance to catch a few hours sleep at some aeroport hotel, but after a brief detour for Suzie to access a secret bank account (one of several, apparently), they’re off again.

They go from Stockholm to Oslo to Reykjavik, hopping across the map with no more than an hour’s break between flights. By the end of it, and unable to get more than a few minutes’ rest at a time on the planes, Gwen thinks she might simply fall asleep where she’s standing, if only to escape the headache that’s come back with a vengeance.

Judging from the darkening circles under Suzie’s eyes and the way she keeps gritting her teeth, the past day and a half have caught up to her just as strongly as they have to Gwen.

When they get off the last flight and Suzie starts scanning the departures board, Gwen puts her foot down and says, ‘Let’s get a hotel.’

Suzie looks at her as if she’s surprised by the sound of Gwen’s voice. Gwen almost is herself.

‘We can’t stop now,’ she says. ‘The farther we get from Torchwood, the longer trail we leave, the safer we are—’

‘We’re not going to be safe if we keep pushing ourselves like this,’ says Gwen, sharper than she’d intended. Then, more gently: ‘We’re both half-dead already, Suzie. Let’s not go all the way just yet.’

Suzie looks like she wants to argue, but in the end her shoulders slump in clear exhaustion and she relents. Gwen feels a surge of relief, and if she can’t quite tell if it’s her feeling or Suzie’s, does it really matter?

Evidently the aeroport hotel is almost full up, because when they get to the room there’s only one bed, rather than two.

Gwen is so tired she thinks she could sleep on the floor if the carpet was plush enough, so the fact that there’s a bed at all is the only thing to register with her. But Suzie stops in her tracks, oddly nervous, and says, ‘I should ring down, see if they’ve got a cot.’

‘You’re alright,’ says Gwen. She sits on the edge of the bed and starts unlacing her shoes. ‘It’s just one night, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose,’ says Suzie, still a bit reluctant, but after a moment she sits too, close enough that their shoulders almost touch. She takes off her own shoes, then says thoughtfully, ‘We should go to America next. A big city like New York, somewhere we can hide.’

Gwen just nods vaguely, for now unable to think of anything beyond the four walls of the hotel room and Suzie sat beside her. She says, ‘Let’s go to bed. Talk in the morning.’

Suzie’s eyes, still bright, soften then. She says, just as soft, ‘Alright.’

They don’t have pyjamas, or any clothes other than what they’re wearing, for that matter, but they picked up some toiletries in the aeroport. Gwen goes into the toilet and brushes her teeth, doing her best not to look at herself in the mirror. Either she’ll look different, or exactly the same, no matter what she’s been through, and she’s not quite sure which would be worse.

When she comes back into the room, Suzie is taking off her coat, folding it neatly on the dresser. Then she turns, and Gwen sees the shallow cut on her arm, the edge of the bloodless wound in her chest. The marks of her resurrection, and the alien knife Jack used to help bring her back.

She must make a noise of some sort, because Suzie looks up, and sees her watching.

‘Do they hurt?’ asks Gwen.

‘No,’ says Suzie, and her hand goes to the hole at the back of her head, ‘not like that. I suppose it’s because it happened while I was still dead.’

‘So it won’t ever heal, then,’ says Gwen. She thinks of a lifetime with a stab wound in Suzie’s heart, never bleeding out, never healing. Caught in between death and life, just like her. Just like them.

Gwen touches her own chest, trying to imagine what it feels like, trying to feel what Suzie does. It’s the first time she’s reached out deliberately along their connection, but there’s nothing; the absence of pain rather than the presence of anything else.

Suzie watches her and says, ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know if our heads will heal, either. We’ll have to be careful.’

‘Were we going to be otherwise?’ says Gwen, and sits back on the bed.

Suzie sighs, then sits across from her on the hotel room’s only chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, haltingly.

Gwen blinks. ‘What for?’ she says, and it comes out only slightly more accusatory than she means it.

‘All of it,’ says Suzie, then bites her lip. ‘That I couldn’t stop any of it. And that . . . well, I just would have liked to give you more than this.’

Gwen doesn’t quite know what to say to that. Oh, she knows what she could say, knows she could remind Suzie that all of this is her fault, that if she wanted to give Gwen something she shouldn’t have started with trying to kill her. She knows she could make this a fight, and she almost wants to, but something stops her.

It’s not that she’s trying to play nice, she realises; to be completely honest, that’s not exactly her forte. No, it’s that Gwen believes her, knows that Suzie really is sorry for it all yet would do it all again, and she doesn’t know what to make of that.

Suzie’s far from innocent, but she’s not a villain, either.

‘We can’t change the past,’ says Gwen finally. It’s more of a platitude than anything, the sort of thing people say when they can’t think of anything better, but since Gwen can’t actually think of anything better, it’ll have to do. ‘Just what we do next.’

Suzie nods, and though Gwen gets the sense she’s disappointed, neither of them press any further. Instead, Gwen gets into bed, wincing when the back of her head touches the pillow before she turns on her side, then after a moment Suzie switches off the light and lies down next to her.

She didn’t think anything of sharing the bed before, sure she’d fall asleep in seconds. But now Gwen’s wide awake, all too aware of Suzie lying next to her, so close. Try as she might, she can’t make herself relax.

And it’s not because she’s afraid, is the thing. Not because she’s trying to sleep in the same bed as a murderer. No, it’s because she’s trying to sleep in the same bed as Suzie, the woman she brought back from the dead, the woman who drove through the night with her, the woman she could have been friends with in another world.

The woman who took Gwen’s life. The woman who gave it back.

She can’t stop thinking about that, it seems, constantly attempting to reconcile what Suzie’s done with who she is, if there’s any difference. But there must be; Gwen has done things she’d have never thought herself capable of before joining Torchwood, but she’s still the same person. Isn’t she?

Gwen sighs, and stares out at the darkened hotel room. It’s all such a mess. It’s shitty and fucked-up and she has no idea if she’ll ever be able to fix it.

But when she looks at Suzie, she doesn’t just see the blood on her hands, and that more than anything is what scares her.

She hasn’t resolved anything, not even to herself, but her body wins out. Between one moment and the next, Gwen slips into a deep but uneasy sleep.

‘How long do you think it’ll be before they find us?’ asks Gwen, and doesn’t have to specify who “they” are.

‘They won’t,’ says Suzie, and doesn’t seem inclined to elaborate.

‘Well, alright, but worst-case scenario.’

Feeling much less tired but significantly more jet-lagged, Gwen and Suzie are on a flight to Boston, as it was the only American destination available on such short notice.

‘It wouldn’t be difficult to track us to the aeroport, even with the ferry and paying with cash,’ says Suzie in an undertone, cautious of any potential listeners in the other seats. ‘Perhaps a day or two at the outside. But after that, Torchwood just doesn’t have the jurisdiction to operate outside Great Britain. Jack may very well decide it’s worth it to have Tosh hack into the security footage, but he may not. Either way, that will take more time.’

‘So it’s down to luck, isn’t it?’ says Gwen, and sighs. After everything Suzie’s said, and with everything she knows about Jack, for that matter, she can’t imagine him just letting them go.

‘We’ve been lucky thus far,’ says Suzie, with an unexpected degree of optimism. She nudges Gwen’s shoulder with hers, and gives her a brief smile. ‘You never know.’

They both fall silent, somehow feeling far easier than it did only a day ago, and Gwen can’t help herself from asking something she’s been wondering. ‘How long did you work for Torchwood?’

Suzie glances at her, and Gwen thinks she won’t want to talk about that, now that she’s left it behind. Instead she says, ‘Six years, though it feels like forever.’

‘And me with only three months under my belt,’ says Gwen, trying to laugh. ‘God, I can’t imagine that. What you must have seen . . .’

Suzie scoffs, and brushes an errant curl out of her eyes. ‘You know what I’ve seen,’ she says bitterly. ‘You’ve seen it too. All the blood and death and filth. All the worst parts of the world.’

‘That’s it?’ says Gwen, a tad disbelieving. ‘You told me you loved the job. I do too. It’s horrible, and awful, and mad, but it’s wonderful too. I’ve seen amazing things, things I would never have thought possible. Don’t tell me you haven’t.’

‘I can’t,’ says Suzie, and she seems almost upset by it. ‘Of course I can’t. It’s what made it so much worse, you know? All those glimpses of how beautiful the universe could be. Like the glove.’

They both fall silent as a stewardess comes by with peanuts on offer, then when she’s gone Gwen says, ‘You think the glove’s beautiful?’

‘Of course,’ says Suzie again. ‘I mean, think about what kind of a civilisation could have made something so powerful. Not only that, it’s . . . I don’t know, elegant. Intuitive. I had no idea what it was at first—some fisherman dredged it out of the Bay, and my best guess was that it was a piece of some alien suit of armour.

‘Maybe it was, for all I know, but when I put it on, I just sort of knew what it could do. I ended up bringing back a fish the first time, only for about five seconds, but it was like the glove itself told me what it was capable of.’

‘Like it had some sort of consciousness?’ asks Gwen, Suzie’s enthusiasm drawing her in. ‘A will, or an intent?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Suzie, frowning as she thinks. ‘I never will, now. But I don’t think it was alive, or sentient, by any means. It just got inside my head. You felt it too.’

She says it like a statement of fact, but Gwen shakes her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I felt something, but I don’t think it was the glove, exactly. I think it was you.’

Suzie blinks, then looks down at her hands. ‘I never managed to bring anyone back long enough for that sort of connection,’ she says. ‘I always thought it was possible—it’s what I thought you could do, how you could bring me back—but that was just hope, really. Wishful thinking.’

Wishful thinking that months and months of planning relied on, that Suzie put so much faith in. So much faith that Suzie put in Gwen.

Rather than go down that path of conversation, however, Gwen says, ‘Did you find the Life Knife at the same time as the glove?’

‘The what?’ says Suzie, sounding baffled.

‘The alien knife,’ clarifies Gwen. ‘It’s, er, what Ianto called it.’

Suzie scoffs. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t have expected it from Ianto, though. He always seemed so professional.’

‘He also suggested calling the glove the Risen Mitten,’ says Gwen, a smile tugging at her mouth even as she tries to keep a straight face.

‘Christ, he didn’t,’ says Suzie. Then she starts laughing, and Gwen can’t help it anymore; she does too.

For a moment, just a moment, everything’s so easy. It’s like they’re colleagues, friends, like they’re back at Torchwood and nothing’s ever gone wrong. Gwen doesn’t want it to end.

‘To answer your question,’ says Suzie, once she’s finished laughing, ‘the knife came through the Rift about a month later, in a carpark in Roath. Maybe it’s silly, but because the glove spent forty years at the bottom of the Bay, I always imagined the knife was waiting for me to find it first. Like the metallic resonance worked across all that space and time.’

Now she has to tread carefully, Gwen thinks. Aloud she says, ‘Do you think they’ve destroyed the knife too?’

‘I would have, if I were Jack,’ says Suzie, ‘but he never liked to get rid of anything if he could help it. Besides, the knife never had any power of its own, it just enhanced the glove. It’s probably inert and useless now.’

Or it may still be able to interact with the connection between them. Knives are meant to cut things, after all. Perhaps that could extend to their tether.

Gwen tries to imagine it, then, what it would be like to leave Suzie behind, and go back to Torchwood. Yet all she can think of is Suzie dead again, lying under a sheet on a cold metal table.

Time passes.

They get to New York, still looking over their shoulders everywhere they go, but either Torchwood has decided to leave them alone, or far more likely, hasn’t found them yet. Suzie still thinks it’ll only be a matter of time, and rationally Gwen agrees with her, but she finds herself hoping that this is it, that they’ve made it out and can just live their lives. Unlives. Whatever.

In her defence, it’s all too easy to slip into a sort of bizarre domesticity. They’ve got a flat now, or an apartment like the Americans call it, and New York feels so different from Cardiff, so distant from her old life, that Gwen hardly thinks of it. She should feel worse about that, spend her days telling herself off for what she’s done to Rhys and her mum and dad, or at the very least missing her job at Torchwood, but she scarcely does.

(Some days it feels like she actually died that day on the ferry and never came back, and this is her afterlife, just her and Suzie, the rest of the world merely a backdrop. Some days Suzie talks like she feels the same way, and Gwen doesn’t know whether she wants her to or not.)

But sometimes, when Gwen does remember her old life, when she does feel guilty about leaving it all behind, she goes to a library or an Internet café, somewhere her IP address won’t be tracked, and searches the Web for news from Cardiff. It’s as direct as she dares—even if Torchwood has given up on them, Tosh is surely still tracking searches of her family’s names or any other sort of suspicious keywords—but she can read between the lines, look for anything that Torchwood might have been involved in.

An obituary for Eugene Jones, the poor boy who kept hanging around and trying to speak to her about aliens. Strange deaths that are almost certainly Weevil attacks. Every unexplained occurrence, everything that’s just part and parcel of living in Cardiff but was once her whole life. It’s undoubtedly depressing, but Gwen puts herself through it as a sort of reminder not to get too caught up with Suzie, that she can’t forget about what she’s left behind.

Gwen’s come back to the flat after another one of those information-gathering/self-flagellating sessions, only a few steps in the door, when Suzie says, ‘You can’t keep doing that.’

She sighs, and drops her bag on the floor. They’ve had this argument before, and Gwen doesn’t particularly want to have it again, but nor does she want to just give in, so another row it is then. ‘I’m being careful.’

‘Even if you use different computers, how many New Yorkers do you think are reading BBC Cymru?’ asks Suzie. She sounds calm and infuriatingly practical, still sat on the sofa in their living room, but Gwen can feel her, upset and tense and afraid. It doesn’t change her mind, though. Gwen knows Suzie can feel her just as easily, her frustration and guilt and deliberate homesickness.

(That’s another thing. Their connection is getting stronger and stronger by the day, and Gwen doesn’t know when, or if, it’ll ever end.)

‘What, so Torchwood is tracking the search history of every single person on the planet?’ says Gwen. ‘Piss off.’

‘I just don’t see why you’re doing any of it,’ says Suzie, the slightest edge of pleading in her voice. Gwen feels a stab of regret, then, but all that disappears when Suzie adds, sarcastically, ‘I’m sure if Torchwood finds us, their first priority will be publishing a news article about it.’

‘That’s not why I’m doing it, and you know it.’

‘Oh, then enlighten me, please.’

They glare at each other, neither willing to concede. Gwen knows she’s stubborn, but she may well have met her match in Suzie.

‘I gave everything up for you,’ says Gwen eventually, unable to bear the silence and Suzie just staring at her. ‘Everything. My entire life. So I’m sorry if I’m inconveniencing you, but I don’t want to forget any of it.’

‘You still think you can go back, don’t you?’ says Suzie, and Gwen can’t help her flinch. ‘You do. You think that if Torchwood finds you, they’ll let you back like nothing ever happened, but you have no idea what they’re capable of, what they’ll do if they catch us.’

‘That’s not true,’ says Gwen. There’s a startling moment where she’s not quite sure if she’s lying or not; she knows Torchwood won’t take her back with Suzie still alive, and maybe not even then, and she knows either way there’s nothing she can do about it without the knife. But would she, if she could?

Yes, of course she would. Wouldn’t she?

Suzie laughs, a bitter, jagged sound, too loud in the tense atmosphere of the flat, and stands, moving towards Gwen. ‘Of course it is,’ she says. ‘You never wanted this, did you? You would have prefered to stay at Torchwood, being perfect Miss Gwen Cooper. Going home to your boyfriend and shagging everyone else on the side. Dead before you’re thirty-five, just another death by Torchwood.’

‘Fuck you!’ shouts Gwen, clenching her hands into fists like she can reach out and grab Suzie by the shoulders. ‘You don’t know me. You never wanted to know me! You wanted me to die, to sacrifice myself for you, just so you could live. Well too fucking bad, Suzie, you didn’t get what you wanted. You’re stuck with me, and what are you going to do about it?’

Suzie stares at her, eyes wild with a fury that Gwen can feel like it’s her own, an all-consuming fire trapped under her ribs. She steps closer, every movement rigid, and for a moment Gwen genuinely thinks Suzie’s going to kill her. For a moment Gwen wants to see her try.

Then Suzie grabs her by the shoulders and kisses her.

Everything stops, all the rage and resentment and fear vanishing like it was never there at all. Suzie’s hand is in Gwen’s hair, brushing against the tender spot at the back of her head that still won’t heal, but Gwen doesn’t care. All she can think about is kissing Suzie back.

It’s not their first kiss, technically, but the kiss on the ferry was soft, easy, a farewell when they both thought Gwen was going to die. This kiss is passionate, almost violent, their fight forgotten except where it spills over into their lips on each other.

Gwen pushes Suzie back until her legs hit the sofa, and then they’re crashing onto it, still in each other’s arms. For once Gwen doesn’t think about what she’s doing, doesn’t doubt herself. It feels like everything’s been building to this, like Gwen found Torchwood, and Suzie shot herself in the head, and Gwen brought her back from the dead, all so they could be here now in this New York flat and snog each other senseless.

Or not quite senseless, because Gwen’s brain does catch up with her body long enough for her to pull away from Suzie and get out, ‘This doesn’t mean I’m done fighting with you.’

‘Good,’ says Suzie, and pulls her back. ‘Neither am I.’

Some time later, after they managed to make it into Gwen’s bed, she stares up at the ceiling and says, ‘I can’t decide if this is going to make things better, or even worse.’

‘Hm, hard to say,’ says Suzie. ‘Is there a third option?’

Gwen laughs despite herself, then turns onto her side to look at Suzie. She feels better than she has in months, like there’s some weight off her shoulders, but she knows it can’t last. ‘What are we doing?’

‘Aside from having sex?’ asks Suzie blithely, then sighs. ‘Yes, alright, don’t look at me like that, but really, do we have to be doing anything else?’

‘So what, friends with benefits?’ says Gwen. She thinks briefly of Owen with a flush of shame that Suzie can undoubtedly feel, and worse, guess at the cause, then banishes the image as best she can. ‘Like that ever ends well.’

‘So you want more than that?’ asks Suzie, and scoffs. ‘Could have fooled me.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ demands Gwen, though she already knows. It’s what they’ve been fighting about all along, really.

‘It means what I said,’ says Suzie. She turns over onto her back and looks pointedly at the ceiling. ‘Just because we’ve shagged doesn’t mean you’ve changed your mind about any of this. You don’t want to be here.’

‘Of course I don’t!’ says Gwen, the words coming out so forcefully it’s almost like an explosion. She gets out of bed and starts hunting for where she’s left her clothes scattered across the floor, all so she doesn’t have to look at Suzie anymore.

‘What?’ says Suzie, almost like she’s actually shocked, like everything Gwen’s said never happened at all. That, more than anything, Gwen can’t stand, and she whips back around.

‘My God, Suzie, you killed me! Oh, sure, you were sad about it, maybe you didn’t want to, but if I hadn’t come back you wouldn’t have given me a second thought!’ Gwen takes a deep breath, pulls a hand through her hair. ‘I came along with you because you said Torchwood would kill me if I didn’t. That’s it! That’s not a choice.’

‘I know,’ says Suzie, her voice quiet in the sudden silence left behind by Gwen. ‘And believe me, I’m sorry. I never wanted it to be like this. But how else could it be? There’s no more options for us. You have to accept that.’

‘Like hell I do,’ says Gwen hotly. Then, because she’s still only in her bra and pants and it feels ridiculous to have a fight like this without any clothes on, she starts dressing again. ‘I’m not going to shut up and do whatever you tell me, Suzie. I’m not going to be your bloody happy ending.’

‘So what, then?’ asks Suzie, and puts a hand on her cheek, looking exhausted. Feeling exhausted, though Gwen’s doing her best to ignore that, the hum of the connection between them. ‘You said it yourself. I’m stuck with you. Are we just supposed to spend the rest of our lives sniping at each other?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Gwen, and now she’s exhausted too. ‘But we’d better bloody well figure it out.’

They don’t exactly avoid each other, after that, but it’s a close thing. Gwen doesn’t want to stop fighting, but neither does she have any idea at all about what to do otherwise, so she restrains herself to occasional comments on the weather and the traffic and all that mundane nonsense. Suzie does too, not that it stops her from giving Gwen long and searching looks when she thinks Gwen can’t see her.

Christ, the pair of them. Maybe they are meant for each other after all.

It’s just that Gwen doesn’t know how she feels about herself, let alone how she feels about Suzie. It’s all too complicated, all too caught up in history and contradiction and questions without any answers.

She always thought of herself as someone who had an open heart and cared and always did the right thing because she knew what that right thing was. Torchwood certainly undermined that idea, but being with Suzie makes it even worse.

Who is she, if she shacks up with the cold-blooded murderer who ripped her life away from her? Who is she if she leaves Suzie behind, so brilliant and beautiful and so lost?

There must be an answer somewhere, one side of it that’s true, and right, but Gwen can’t make herself believe she’ll ever find it.

She’s musing on that for what feels like the thousandth time, sat on the sofa with a cup of tea that just tastes off even though it’s the same brand as she would get in Cardiff, when Suzie bursts in and says, ‘Have you seen the news?’

Gwen startles, nearly spilling her tea all over herself, then glares at Suzie. ‘I thought you forbid me from that,’ she says, ‘and if you mean the American news, no.’

Suzie rolls her eyes and hands her a copy of the Times. On the front page, in huge screaming letters, reads the headline: WORLDWIDE PANIC, STRANGE SIGHTINGS, and just below that, in slightly smaller but still urgent letters, A NEW FORM OF TERRORISM?

Gwen puts her cup down on the table, already forgotten, and scans the article. It’s not exactly like anything she’d encountered with Torchwood, but it’s still all-too familiar; UFOs, attacks from soldiers in historical dress, disease, violence. All of it completely unexplained, despite the journalist’s best efforts to blame hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply.

‘Shit,’ she mutters as she reads, then looks back up at Suzie, who looks just as pale as Gwen feels. ‘Is this—?’

‘The Rift?’ asks Suzie, sitting beside her on the sofa. ‘Almost definitely. Jack always told me what sort of things would happen if it opened, the past and the future bleeding into the present. Like what it does in Cardiff already, but on a global scale.’

‘Shit,’ says Gwen again, and drags a hand over her face. ‘How could this have happened? Torchwood must be able to fix it, can’t they?’

Suzie purses her lips, and Gwen feels a flash of hesitation from her, like she’s not sure how Gwen’s going to react. Then she says, ‘The Rift has always been . . . unstable, even moreso in the last few years. It may have simply split open under the pressure.’

‘Oh, that’s just grand,’ says Gwen, then gets up to pace, trying to work out some of this nervous energy as she thinks at the same time. ‘Well, there must be something they can do. Jack knows how the Rift works better than anyone, he’ll have some brilliant idea, won’t he?’

She only realises she’s asking for reassurance, for Suzie to tell her it’ll all be alright when they’re stuck here thousands of miles away, when Suzie just says, quietly, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, there has to be something, Suzie, we can’t just sit here!’ says Gwen. She can feel a headache coming on, and she takes a deep breath in an attempt to calm down. ‘Alright. What will happen if the Rift stays open?’

‘Nothing good,’ says Suzie, her eyebrows furrowed as she thinks. ‘It’ll destabilise more and more, getting wider and wider, letting in not just people and objects but other times themselves. Everything, all at once, until the timeline just breaks under the strain.’

‘Christ,’ says Gwen, and tries not to think of, well, anyone, Rhys and Andy and her mum and dad, Jack and Tosh and Owen and Ianto, all of them caught up in this, all of them in more danger than they’ve ever encountered before. ‘If the Rift closed, would it stop the damage?’

‘Presumably, but there’s no way to close it,’ says Suzie.

‘Just because no one’s ever figured out a way doesn’t mean there isn’t one,’ Gwen points out. She comes to a decision, no matter how much Suzie isn’t going to like it, and says, ‘We have to go. We have to get to Cardiff, to the Hub, see if there’s anything we can do to help—’

‘We can’t,’ says Suzie, and stands. ‘I don’t mean Torchwood will try to kill us; they’ve got bigger things to worry about. But there’s nothing anyone can do, and even if we left right now, the Rift could completely split open before we get anywhere near Cardiff.’

‘I don’t care!’ says Gwen. ‘I’m not just going to pretend everything’s fine when I could be doing something. I’ve spent the last few months cooped up in here, not doing anything, not helping anyone, and now I have a chance—’

‘They don’t need you!’ shouts Suzie, her typical composure almost completely in pieces. Gwen opens her mouth to shout something right back at her, but then Suzie puts her hands, cool and soft, on either side of Gwen’s face, in a way that’s almost achingly gentle. ‘But I do.’

‘What?’ says Gwen, startled by the admission, not entirely sure it’s not just another attempt at telling her what she wants to hear.

‘When I planned all this,’ says Suzie, and she drops her hands to hold Gwen’s, ‘I thought I would be alone. I never anticipated—well, things changed, and you were there, and I realised that I could do it alone, but I didn’t want to. I’d never wanted it, I just had to, but then I didn’t, because of you.’

She says it all at once, her words almost stumbling over each other, her calm shattered and gone in a way that’s almost more frightening than the Rift splitting open and bringing them with it.

‘Suzie,’ says Gwen, her heart thudding in her chest because this is it, isn’t it? Whatever “it” is? ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that if this is really the end of the world,’ says Suzie, and she looks like she really thinks it is, never mind Gwen’s slightly desperate optimism, ‘if we’re really going to die and go back into the dark, I want to do it with you.’

‘Is that true?’ asks Gwen. They’re still holding hands. ‘Or are you just trying to stop me from going back by myself?’

‘What’s the point in lying now?’ says Suzie ruefully. ‘It’s all true, Gwen. If you’ll have me.’

‘Until the end of the world,’ says Gwen, almost but not quite a question.

She’s never been good at letting anything go, at giving up when there’s something she could be doing, some answer to find, some solution to save the day. It served her well at Torchwood, but she’s not at Torchwood anymore, is she? If Suzie’s right, there’s nothing she can do, nothing anyone can do.

Would it be so bad, then, to just be here until the end?

‘Alright,’ says Gwen, and she’s got no idea if it’s the right thing at all but she can’t quite bring herself to care anymore. ‘I’ll stay with you, Suzie.’

The world doesn’t end, somehow.

They hole up in the flat, the BBC on even though half the time Gwen can’t bear to watch. Even the typically unflappable news anchors are on the edge of the panic, and the rips in time are only getting worse, not better.

Then, in the midst of confused reports about some sort of giant monster stalking the streets of Cardiff (and sure, why not at this point), it all just . . . stops.

There’s a shift, something so faint and indescribable Gwen doubts she would have even noticed it if she wasn’t paying attention. But it’s there, and Gwen knows, deep inside, that it’s all over. The Rift, the holes in space and time, everything.

‘Did you feel that?’ she asks Suzie, who’s frowning intently on the other side of the sofa.

‘How did they do it?’ says Suzie, sounding almost annoyed that Torchwood thought of a solution she couldn’t find. ‘No one’s ever been able to figure out how to close the Rift, just open it more.’

‘Could they have closed it permanently?’ says Gwen. ‘Cardiff back to normal, no need for Torchwood.’

‘Anything’s possible,’ says Suzie, then abruptly grins and grabs Gwen’s hand. ‘But we’re alive, Gwen! We made it through.’

‘Sure, being sat on our backsides the entire time,’ says Gwen, but Suzie’s excitement bubbles up in her and soon she’s smiling too. ‘My God, the world’s saved after all.’

‘We’re saved,’ says Suzie.

Perhaps it’s a bad idea, but the past few months haven’t exactly been made up of good choices. Gwen leans in and kisses Suzie, trying to savour every last moment of it, every last sensation. It’s sweet and slow, and when she draws back, Suzie looks at her with wide eyes.

‘You’ve never done that before,’ says Suzie. ‘Initiated things, I mean.’

‘We almost died,’ says Gwen, ‘again. It seemed appropriate.’

Suzie regards her carefully. ‘Does that mean you’ll stay?’ she asks, her tone casual, but Gwen can feel how much she wants it underneath her mask. ‘Even now?’

Again, Gwen hesitates.

She’s still in a war with herself, not knowing what to do, where to turn. But as loath as she is to admit it, Torchwood’s gone. Maybe not forever, maybe there’s still a way . . .

But Gwen can’t do anything there, and she can here.

She can be with Suzie, mad and beautiful Suzie, who’s like no one she’s ever met, who’s offering her something she’s never dreamed of.

That, she can do, and Gwen’s never backed down from doing what she can.

‘Yes,’ she says, and takes Suzie’s hands again, pulling her close. ‘I’ll stay.’