Title: The Only Constant
Author: Aeshna
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG
Word count: 1,621
Characters: Gwen Cooper
Summary: This too shall pass....
Spoilers: TW 1.13 End of Days, TW 2.12 Fragments and TW 2.13 Exit Wounds; also a bit of borrowing from the official BBC website. Takes place prior to the events at the end of DW s4.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.
Archive: Sure, whoever wants it – just let me know where it ends up!
Notes: Another odd, naggy little bunny that wanted out after the end of s2. Post-Exit Wounds, pre-The Stolen Earth, this was written some time before Lost Souls aired but is only now escaping the hard-drive – annoying as I think canon has now beaten me to the punch on several fronts! Oh well, at least it'll hopefully make it out before everybody else jumps on this particular theme!

Thanks as always to mimarie – any remaining weirdnesses are all mine. Feedback of any variety is much appreciated but not compulsory – I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....

Gwen paused, one hand pressed flat against the cool steel of the filing cabinet drawer as she stared into the shadows... then swore under her breath and shook her head. The storage vault was empty but for her and the impersonal ranks of recorded missions past, the only sounds the quiet buzz of the ancient light fitting flickering overhead and the echoing drip of some corroded pipework, but for a moment, just a moment, she could have sworn....

The moment passed. Gwen swallowed hard and closed her eyes against whatever cruel trick of light and memory had raised the spectre of loss once more. The distant past always hung too heavy in the dark warren of vaults beneath the bay and it was too soon, too soon, but what else was there but to carry on? There was nobody else who could do most of the work that so desperately needed doing, nobody who could take over, let them grieve, nobody who could even begin to understand. Caught between anger and frustration, she hauled out a neatly-labelled drawer in a clatter of half-rusted rollers... and found herself sobbing on the dusty concrete floor, choking on tears, pulling her knees up against her chest as she huddled against battered metal and tried to dismiss the memory that was all too clear in her mind.

It had, after all, been barely a week since Jack had slid Tosh into a chill, neatly-labelled drawer of her own.

Gwen tipped her head back, staring up at the dim outlines of Victorian brickwork overhead. This, it seemed, was her life now – a terrifying mix of familiar routine, random crises and a stalking shadow of loss that struck at unexpected moments. Tosh – brave, sweet, clever Toshiko – gone forever, bled out and shut away. And Owen – god, they all hoped Owen was gone, released from the strange half-life of the past few months and not trapped somewhere unreachable, still conscious but unable to communicate. Tosh and Owen gone; her and Ianto and Jack left behind to carry on, just carry on, until finally....

She sniffled, the tears finally abating, and pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe at her wet eyes. Ianto was as bad as she was: putting on a brave face but his composure crumbling each time something small and familiar caught him by surprise, dragging the grief to the surface. Jack was coping better, so far as either of them could tell – too quiet and oddly solicitous, perhaps, but holding their broken little team together through sheer presence and determination, a rock to which they both could cling. Rhys, bless him, was playing his part too, bringing food and offering space to grieve, his gentle understanding almost more than Gwen could bear or feel they deserved. Jack had threatened to recruit him as a full-time chef after Rhys had left a freshly-made lasagne and tart tartine on the invisible lift and phoned down to let them know. Gwen wasn't entirely sure that he was joking.

Glancing up at the open drawer above her, Gwen sighed. She wondered how many others had sat and wept here, alone in the depths, mourning comrades dead long before she had been born; wondered how many more would follow in the future. Wondered which of them would be next to be lost – her or Ianto or whoever Jack inevitably found to fill the gaps. The only guarantee was that it wouldn't be Jack himself, would never be Jack....

Just for a moment, she hated him for that.

Gwen blew her nose, the sound echoing loudly against the vault's arched ceiling, and pushed herself to her feet, forcing all thoughts of anything bar her errand from her mind. There were anomalous readings being picked up from the area around Sully Hospital that the computer suggested might tie in with a similar, unresolved case in 1998, and possibly others in 1957 and 1934. While most of the information was stored in the electronic files, there were occasionally further snippets and footnotes in the paper records, photos and plans and newspaper cuttings slipped in after the fact. Letting her fingers trail across the neat labels – reference number, location – that marked the top of each hanging file, Gwen found the one she needed, pushing others aside to let her extract the folder –

And heard the faint clunk of something dropping to the bottom of the drawer as the movement dislodged it.

Pulling her file – "IR#1998/423 HAYES POINT" – free and setting it aside, Gwen sighed and pushed her hair back from her forehead, frowning at the open drawer. Someone must have missed their target while adding something to one of the records, slipping it between the pockets of green card instead of within, and she felt a sudden curiosity as to what had been misplaced by her anonymous predecessor. Going back to the front of the drawer, she started peering between the files, looking for the stray – hopefully it had been labelled as to which incident report it belonged to so she could return it to its intended destination.

She finally found it between the fifteenth and sixteenth files, a piece of card with something written on its smooth white surface. Its texture alone told her that it was a photograph and Gwen lifted it out carefully by its edges, not wanting to smudge fingerprints across whatever was printed on the other side. Angling it into the flickering yellow glow of the vault's light she could see that there was no reference number, just words written in a cheerfully looping hand:

"CJ: 100 not out! – 1999"

Breath suddenly catching in her throat, Gwen turned the photo over.

Five men and a single woman, sitting in what appeared to be a corner booth in a pub or club, all of them grinning drunkenly, arms slung around each other as they raised champagne flutes to the camera. Several empty bottles littered the table before them, along with the remnants of what might have been a birthday or anniversary cake, if the bright suggestions of marzipan shapes and numbers amidst the crumbs were anything to go by. The apparent eldest of the group – short, greying hair and laughing eyes – looked to be in his forties while the others were younger, twenties and thirties, a mix of colourings and ethnicities united in gleeful inebriation.

And there, right in the middle of the group, was Jack.

He looked the same as he always did; his expression lighter, perhaps, than she had seen in a while – laughing, smiling, looking like he belonged there – sleeves rolled up past his elbows and a smudge of what might be lipstick across one cheek. There was a child's plastic centurion helmet, of the sort they sold in the castle shop, perched jauntily atop his head and a huge badge reading "100 today!!!" pinned to one of his braces. The group looked as if they... fit together, and it wasn't hard to read from the badge and the absurd hat that they all knew about his strange immortality –

Gwen raised a hand to her mouth, recognising the group for what and who they were. Torchwood Three – not the team she knew, but an earlier incarnation, just as real, just as valid. Just as much of a family for Jack, as they enjoyed themselves together, laughing and joking together.

There were five bodies in the morgue that had been interred together, all Torchwood operatives, all at the start of 2000. The labels on their drawers had become too-familiar friends during her long vigil after Abaddon.

All lost at once, then, lost together, leaving Jack to carry on alone – a clean break, total loss, leaving him to recruit and rewrite his own history, covering his past and his nature for as long as he could. She couldn't begin to understand even half of why Jack did what he did, but grief... oh, how she understood grief: the soul-deep pain, the choking desperation, the frightening urge to just run and run and never stop....

Gwen gazed at the photo for long moments, at the shadow of tragedy – how much longer had they had? – written into a moment of joy, then carefully tucked it into the file she had come for. She would show it to Ianto, she decided – not to Jack, never to Jack, who guarded his past too zealously to allow this fragment free – and she would find a photo of their team, all five of them, and tuck it into an envelope alongside this earlier group. And then she would hide it away in the archives once more, small snapshots of Torchwood's human history for some unknown successor to find.

Not as a reminder of loss or of fragile mortality or even that life went on, but that Jack – too quiet and oddly solicitous – went through it every time: loving and losing, mourning and moving on, holding them together and carrying them with him. That he went through it all, time and again, for them, for his team, whoever they might be. That he always had, for however much of that celebrated century had been spent at Torchwood; for all of the years that had passed since.

And that he always would.

She brushed fresh tears from her eyes, feeling everything settle into a new perspective. Two were gone, but three remained, for now, a family far truer than blood had proved. If Jack was there for them, perhaps it was time for them to step back and look to the future and be there for him as well.

Clutching the file against her chest, Gwen pushed the filing cabinet shut with her hip and left the archives and their echoes of the past behind her.

~ fin ~